Esther Stories

Foreword

These engrossing stories are too pure and subtle to be called a proof and demonstration of the power of literary realism. Such a statement would have to be translated into suppler language in order to sound as true as it is in fact — into words that could respect how naturally the stories are told, how quiet they are, how innocent of pretense and full of implication.

Realism has been so predominant a style among American writers for so many generations that it is easy to forget it is a style, and a sharp departure from the courtliness and conventionalism that had prevailed in earlier centuries. Its lineage is clearly traceable to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, when writers awakened to the poetry of common speech and the revelations of ordinary daylight. Over the years it has sometimes taken on a moralizing tone, often in association with sensationalism, that famous elixir of flagging invention. But in itself it is both impetus and method for exploration of the astounding world of human experience, the impetus being that the subject is inexhaustible, and the method being the resource of insight and intuition any writer can bring to it. Nothing prevents realism from being called a metaphysics of consciousness except an honorable realist dread of entrapment in categories and abstractions on one hand, and, on the other, a superficial familiarity that masks its most interesting effects.

Time is a subject in Esther Stories. This most universal and commonplace experience is also a great mystery, to science, to philosophy, to any reflecting mind. These fictions stir a kind of recognition that is as intimate as awakened memory, acquiescence in a knowledge so habitual we are startled to be reminded of it.

A boy and girl spend a furtive night together at an abandoned motel. Virgins before that night, they imagine themselves transformed by this shared initiation. They are eager to try the effects of the change on their school friends. But the boy wakes in the morning to find that the girl has left him there, driven off in his car. He is stung by this act of abandonment, his rage and bewilderment seemingly out of all proportion to the act itself. She has left as a kind of vengeance in anticipation of abandonment she knows she will suffer—“her father had gotten away with it.” And he knows the grief he feels will matter, that “this right now will always be worse than any funeral.” Their step into adulthood awakens the demons waiting there, memories that bring with them inevitable iterations of grief and dread and self-defeat. The past spreads into the future like the waters of a flood, its flows and currents dominating the landscape.

An old navy veteran has only one memory, a story he tells compulsively, not remembering that he has told it before. It is the memory of one atrocious act for which no confession or contrition is adequate, and it, with its rituals of attempted release, is more present to him than present time.

A woman whose presence has power that might be attributed to beauty or charm, but which is not to be accounted for in such conventional terms, is the pride and grief and fascination of her family and is isolated from them by this very fascination. And after her early death she lives on in their stories, mysterious as she ever was in life, immortal in her isolation.

Often the settings of these stories are those American places that are both provincial and universal, unheard-of towns with familiar customs and landmarks, like almost anywhere on the Fourth of July. The hauntingly recent past is abandoned along the highway, falling into unconsecrated ruin, speaking from the peripheries of awareness, having no appeal to make for itself except to the intimacy of colloquial memory. In this light, or twilight, the appeal is not to be resisted.

In Esther Stories events send their repercussions across time so that they become event again and again, like sound or shock. Their magnitude cannot be measured apart from their effects. These stories are tentative measures of impact as it moves through families or generations, or is felt by a stranger in the outskirts of a town where a murder happened, or in a house where a tenant has died. Unquantifiable in themselves since by implication their consequences have no certain limit, they come near erasing our hierarchies of relative significance. We know now what a telling spark can be struck from a pervading and invisible medium of reality. These stories make the same discovery.

Marilynne Robinson