rev. of Blue Spruce by David Long
Blue Spruce
Stories by David Long. Scribner, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee.
The twelve stories in David Long’s third collection,
Blue Spruce, are distinctive for many reasons, but mostly they are marked by place — namely, Montana and other points Northwest. Restless, lonely, the people in Long’s stories are inheritors of the American West, frequently on the run, jumping into their cars for the expanse of the road, for the release of the contemporary frontier. What impels them, though, is vague, and, when pressed to name a destination of preference, they are at an even greater loss.
In “Eggarine,” the teenaged Jay McCauley ruminates: “I pictured myself running outdoors and fleeing in the car again, but the thought filled me with desperation. What good was it, where could I go that was not still the earth?” He grows up to be a moody, unmarried man with a dead-end job, and he reproaches himself for failing to meet his parents’ expectations. But his mother calmly says to him one night, “There’s nothing wrong with you, honey. It’s not a race.”
Such moments are typical for Long. His stories are rangy, complex, wry, and unpredictable, moving toward what one would expect to be a significant revelation, only to present an ironic and opposite pronouncement — an anti-epiphany. For instance, “Attraction,” a stunning, beautiful story, begins when Marly Wilcox is fifteen, shyly in love with Charles, who has been dumped by another classmate, Cynthia. Flamboyant and somewhat crude, Cynthia has an affair with a much older man, whose daughter coolly gouges out Cynthia’s eye with a key. Years later, after Marly’s mother, Jeanette, has squandered her college fund, Marly waits tables at the same restaurant where Cynthia is employed. She becomes Cynthia’s confidant, even babysitting her daughter, Cher, while Cynthia cheats on her husband with Charles. Marly intercedes with her own seduction, however, and, very briefly, contemplates the weight of what she has done. But then she denies herself this indulgence in melodrama, in self-importance: “Hours before,
hurrying out of the truck — exhausted, mortified — she’d been hit by the absurd intuition that all their lives depended on her now, even Cher’s. By daylight, the momentousness of the night before had washed off, the nervous glitter. It was just true, as Jeanette would say, a fact she’d have to live with.”
Time and time again, the characters in
Blue Spruce dismiss the possibility of solving imponderables. “Who’s to say?” a woman sighs. “You can find a reason for anything, reasons are nothing, reasons are common as flies.” In another story, a man thinks, “None of it was a mystery, just what happens.”
With no answers available, there are only two choices in Long’s world: become cloistered in bitterness — “mean” and “constricted” — or move on. Forget, accept, surrender, forgive — whatever the case, just move on. In “Cooperstown,” Robert Isham, a former major-league pitcher, goes to visit Andy Hewitt, the phenom he had intentionally beaned twelve years ago, ending what promised to be a Hall of Fame career. Isham, now selling sports equipment, thrice divorced, is looking for absolution, but Hewitt and his wife are beyond recriminations. They have a family now, own a marina. “You don’t have to think the same way all your life,” the wife says to Isham. In the final story, “The New World,” the owner of a hardware business abandons his noisome, alcoholic daughter, buys a new DeSoto, and ends up in Oregon, where he falls in love with a woman and begins an entirely new life. What amazes him is “his own amazement. That the man he’d become, so late in the game, could wonder at things, his mind bright, not swamped
and close.”
David Long is gifted, often outright brilliant, in bringing this capacity for wonder to his readers.
Blue Spruce, with Long’s sumptuous prose and languid narrative, is a substantial, wise book — and a thoroughly satisfying one.
