rev. of Lies of the Saints by Erin McGraw

Lies of the Saints 
Stories by Erin McGraw. Chronicle Books, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Ann Harleman.

“Life puts us in each other’s way,” one of Erin McGraw’s characters tells another. That is the beauty of this first collection: the characters — so real that I hesitate, wanting to use the word “people” instead — engage each other in frequent, intense, and surprising ways. A radio talk show hostess is besieged by calls from her ex-husband, who gradually woos her audience away from her; a young man who believes he’s won the lottery dumps his fiancée; the wife of a recovering alcoholic struggles to accept his sobriety, feeling as if she’s “been slammed onto dry land after a long storm”; a realtor dates her friend’s ex-husband while simultaneously allowing herself to be seduced by the friend’s lover. None of these situations has a predictable outcome; yet each ending, when it comes, feels inevitable.

The predicaments in which McGraw’s characters find themselves are ones we ourselves could easily have stumbled into, ratcheted up a notch. They elicit a horrified there-but-for-the-grace-of-God fascination. At the same time, the intensity these characters bring to their lives — “there is nothing in heaven or on earth that I don’t want,” declares an eighty-year-old widow — inspires envy. Despite their wry wisdom — the source of quietly stunning insights which McGraw allows her characters to arrive at for themselves — these men and women continue to entangle themselves and each other in a perpetual tango of desire.

McGraw’s deceptively simple prose turns each story over to her characters. Her loosely woven narration — light but with great tensile strength — lets their voices come through unimpeded; as in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, the only irony is dramatic irony, brought about by the actions of the characters themselves. Sometimes, though, McGraw homes in for a stinging image, or impales one of her characters with a phrase: a realtor hoping for a big sale takes a deep breath of air “sharp as a new dollar bill”; participants in a group for the Newly Single have “the ravenous, terrified support-group look”; a man on the make moves “with calculated detachment, occupying his body as if he’d rented it for the night.” At other times, McGraw, briefly lyrical, captures the wonder of the ordinary world: “the sheen his skin gave off, as if it held too much blood”; “the soil lay like cake in dark and moist ridges”; a baby “born so full of wants.”

Lies of the Saints takes its title from three linked stories that give us the history of a family — father, mother, five children, a granddaughter — over the course of thirty years. This marvelous loaves-and-fishes achievement is repeated in microcosm on nearly every page of the book. What is unsaid matters no less than what is said. Erin McGraw is a writer who knows how to weave the two together, lightly.

Ann Harleman’s collection of short stories, Happiness,
won the 1993 Iowa Prize. Her novel, Bitter Lake,
will be published in October.