Around the end of the year I hope to run an assigned reviewer’s formal, adjudicated, long-ruminated assessment of Rebecca Makkai’s collection of short stories Music for Wartime (Viking, out right now). For the moment, however, I’m going to offer a brief, enthusiastic but personal response to the book by a woman who served as my student assistant at Shenandoah for three years and now has become, through no fault of mine, something of an indispensable writer for our current literary culture, or more importantly, for avid, artful readers.
Yeats told us that “things fall apart,” as Makkai’s stories attest, but she also recognizes, even invokes, a counterforce: things also converge. Needs, opportunities, capacities, chemistry – sometimes they rise and converge, not because the world has read O’Connor, but because the spirals of experience fluctuate. A person (or character) with a particular energy or ability meets someone with an appetite or unacknowledged defect or limitation. A healer, a teacher, a witness is about as likely as a nemesis.
A dying artist finds the partner he needs via the unlikely introduction of a punch in the nose (“Good Saint Anthony Come Around”). A scruffy male musician offers sanctuary to a beleaguered female violist struggling with a question of morality and tact (“Cross”). An old and damaged master violinist teachers a sensitive, even clairvoyant young boy the chance to see his frailties and potential, as friends find refuge in beauty from the history of atrocity. It all sounds pretty standard for short stories when I put it that way, but Makkai’s stories render these situations and people with great attention, resourcefulness and grace. She recognizes “the urgency of everything” but constructs her stories with great patience, precision. My favorite of the stories, “The Worst You Ever Feel” records the “magic of survival” tapped into by some of the Romanian emigre’s who gather in young Aaron’s parents’ house, but the whole collection seems woven around “the music of survival”: devotees of classical music are among the most riveting of the protagonists, and even Bach appears as a character in “Couple of Lovers on a Red Background.”
One of the beauties of Music for Wartime (which seems to be any time) is the dynamic between the contemporary domestic issues – lovers drawing apart, the AIDS epidemic’s impact on the art community, bombings, racial profiling and miscommunication – and the modes of the stories, which run from the naturalistic-realistic narrative to folk tale features (“I’ve lied and turned two women into three, because three is a fairy tale number.”), Kafkaesque mysteries and Borgesian twists of events. A fugitive from tyranny finds another man’s briefcase, then relocates to build a new life around the case owner’s identity until the burden of imposture overwhelms him. A boy is smitten by visions and also occupies himself with constructing stories, and who can say where the one leaves off and the other begins? A circus elephant dies in a town, and the wondrous events and afflictions that follow seem Biblical (“The Miracle Years of Little Fork,” available in the current issue of Ploughshares).
Tragedies and trifles abound, but Makkai’s carefully calibrated threshold of attention and her depth of sympathy, perhaps surprisingly balanced by her broad humor and sometimes wicked wit, make it impossible to anticipate her next move.
But her larger moves so far have been impressive. The Borrower, her first novel, is about flight from persecution, acceptance of difficulties and the role books play in the coming of age. The Hundred-Year House, her second novel, released last year, is a mystery and a tragedy, a comedy and a treasure hunt, a tail of twisted timelines and identity shifting to almost Ovidian degree. Love and the instability of identity run through her work, which is confident and risky. Makkai has a fearless imagination and a virtuoso’s range of tactics, but the heart is at the center of this collection, as she interrogates readers on the nature of reality, “reality shows,” masks and masques and mysteries, the necessity of preserving music. Anyone who has read several of the stories but not “The Miracle Years of Little Fork” will have no apparatus to deal with the dying pachyderm elephant, the assimilation of the circus people, the Biblical assaults of weather, the transformation of the pastor. But in the end, they will seem necessary and coherent.
The publication record of these stories is impressive, most notably the inclusion of four of them in four different volumes of The Best American Short Stories. It’s refreshing to discover that the sometimes crazy literary world, often smitten with fads or brands, has recognized Makkai boldness and her precision.
This testimony, remember, is not offered as an objective or even fairly subjective review. It’s a fan’s enthusiastic recommendation, one man’s unprofessional opinion. I’ve been reading these stories singly as they appeared over the past decade, and as much as I enjoy and appreciate her novels, I hope every day that Makkai is somewhere working on a new story, or that one’s about to appear in a journal. If you see that before I do, let me know.
[By the way, The mid-August issue of The New Yorker recommends this “ impressive collection,” but I’m sticking to my guns.]
