“Yazoo Clay,” a winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, is a collection of eleven stories set in Mississippi. As is often the case with Livingston Press, these pieces partake of the fanciful, the absurd, the experimental, but they don’t necessarily start out that way.
The title story begins realistically: “A sinkhole opened on a residential side street one night.” Residents gathered at the hole and hoped the city would quickly make repairs. The tone then switches to comic: “The city came in their big white trucks. They planted two orange cones around the hole….Then, they left.”
A week later, the city sends a bulldozer which widens the hole and then “The city left the bulldozer there and tied yellow tape from the bulldozer blade to the orange cone.” For many days it rained. Then the city parked a really big bulldozer nearby. “It was like the first bulldozer’s daddy.” Many days pass. Finally, workmen enter the hole, find a broken pipe and beneath it, a large beating heart.
The story “Blowing the Dam” is mostly redneck realism. Three young men go out on their annual chore to blow up a beaver dam. Our narrator, a more sophisticated and gentle soul than his brother and brother-in-law, teaches Latin in a local private school. He is not eager to do this. A vegetarian, he eats grilled mushrooms while the others grill bacon-wrapped dove breasts. He dislikes killing anything, hates the blooding ceremony for a boy’s first deer.
Nevertheless, he participates. We now believe that beavers are good for the environment, create wetlands, are industrious and admirable, and so on. In this instance, however, the beaver dam floods acres of forest and would kill all the trees, so the three young men blow it up and then commence shooting the innocent and helpless beavers as they congregate to rebuild their home. Then the story takes a turn. A wounded beaver, in pain, furious, attacks and severs the narrator’s femoral artery.
The concluding story, “Asses,” is meandering and philosophical, end to end. Two characters, Lefty and Pancho, are in a small, narrow dorm room but the bunk beds are enclosed in glass. Really, the scene is nowhere. It could be on a spaceship.
They begin a dialogue about that old chestnut, what happens when you “assume?” This morphs into an investigation of the nature of free will. If one assumes, where does the assumption, or any idea, come from? If you did not create that idea, who did?
A certain number of readers will be reminded of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” of Vladimir and Estragon, as the dialogue becomes increasingly more absurd and the two discuss motherhood, death, memory and desire.
This is an intriguing collection, ambitious and bright, but not for everyone.
