Not What We Thought, at All
Bret Lott's characters try to make sense of a world upended
by Pablo Tanguay
The Difference Between Women and Men
By Bret Lott (Random House, 208 pp., $23.95)
For nearly two decades, Bret Lott has been writing some of this country's best fiction, and in his new collection of short stories, The Difference Between Men and Women, he returns to the theme that has always driven his work: relentless compassion. Lott's characters are ordinary women and men caught in binds sometimes caused by external forces, sometimes by themselves. Their troubles are complicated by a belief that the world works in a prescribed fashion. In a typical Lott story, the regular order of things is upended, and the characters must reconcile their altered vision with what they've always assumed. The author's work, filled with moral complexities that resist simplistic judgments, stands apart from both the polemic of the moralists and the flat objectivism of the realists. Lott recently told an interviewer, "I'm writing for a humanity that needs to know about grace and forgiveness."
Born in Los Angeles, the now 46-year-old author studied writing at the University of Amherst with the great prose stylist James Baldwin. By 1999, Lott had published several novels and two collections of short stories, as well as a memoir. Then he received a telephone call from Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen his novel Jewel (Simon & Schuster), first published eight years earlier, for her book club. In the span of a single day, Lott went from respected but obscure literary writer to best-selling author: that morning, Jewel was 1,069,713 on the Amazon.com sales chart; by nightfall, it was No. 1.
In The Difference Between Men and Women, the plots begin ordinarily enough. They don't stay that way for long. The first story, "Family," opens with a married couple bickering over something they cannot even remember. The bickering has gone on for so long, in fact, it has become a terrible art form, devoid of content. In the midst of the argument, the couple suddenly realize their children are missing. How long have they been gone? They don't know. Minutes? Years? Finally, the children are found in the storage shed, transformed into dolls, living in an ice chest as miniature adults, angry little replicas of their parents.
The marvel is not that Lott believably renders this fantastical scenario, but that he does so without rancor. He is uninterested in demonizing his heroes. The strength of this story, and of many others in the book like it, is his ability to humanize. At the end of "Family," the reader does not envision the couple as monsters, the children their freakish spawn. Rather, and somewhat shockingly, the couple and their children seem all too real. If Lott is a moral writer, then his morality is concerned not with condemnation, but with understanding.
Throughout the collection, his characters grapple with their new sensibilities. Often, they are bewildered, left beyond speechless: the very words they have learned to say are not enough to describe what they now feel; they have entered a mysterious void where even their language (maybe especially their language) cannot rescue them. In "Gesture," one of the sadder stories here, a grown son's father dies, and the son and his wife sift through the father's belongings: "She says, 'It will be okay,' and though he knows the words to be hollow, he knows them too to be the best ones available, the truest lie he can hear right now." And because the son has no words himself to alleviate his sorrow, Lott ends the story, "What else is there left to do, save feed his children, and begin now to grieve?"
While some stories end sadly, and a few happily, most are left ambiguous and magically open, revealing a kind of emotional and intellectual mystery. In the title story, much of the mystery is rendered by what is absent. Lott doesn't tell readers what he thinks the difference is between women and men. Better, he shows what happens after one man tells his wife what he thinks the difference is. But Lott knows that what the man has actually said is less important than what his words reveal about himself. The man's character is exposed by the bizarre behavior of his wife, which gives a hint as to how outrageous his words must have been. But again, in Lott's nonjudgmental moral world, the husband is not punished for his failings—he is revealed. Toward the end of the story, the wife arrives at a conclusion. She tells her husband, "You are a big and vague, loud and strange man."
There are stories in The Difference Between Women and Men that will break a reader's heart, but Lott can be very funny, too, in a deadpan kind of way. And his attention to the telling detail is extraordinary. But what makes his work stand out most is his concern for his characters. He believes in his protagonists. They may do bad things, but they are not bad people. These characters and the stories that try to contain them are profoundly and desperately human.
Comments (0)