Silent Passengers

The collection's larger interest in the fit of the everyday with the beyond produces an often formal narrative voice congruent with the remoteness and isolation of mood and setting (though set everywhere from Montana to Baltimore and New York, the pervasive conditions are space, sky and light). Whole blocks of prose button Woiwode's usual eloquence into a slightly strained gravitas, a pretty typical example of which occurs in the opening paragraphs of the otherwise intriguing story, "Summer Storms":

What makes summer storms so pernicious is the resistance in our nature to admit them. We acknowledge the naturalness of storms in the spring, yes, when rain on the roof can assume the sound of a waterfall; or in the winter, with a howling wind accompanying drifting snow; or even in the fall, when heavy-bodied rain tears off the last of the leaves and pastes them over spearing stubble. But summer is the season we're to be let off, to be free of this, as we expect to be freed from texts and tests and every onerous chore.

Yet observations here and there give glancing evidence of considerable writerly power: one father sees "past irises of interleaved silver and blue" in his son's eyes ("A Necessary Nap"); another, driving, sees "just beyond his headlights, a silvery upheaval gathered in a swarm" ("Winter Insects"); a seasonal laborer thinks, "I've come to understand that the environment of the entire earth is sky" ("Confessionals").

The stories weave their larger unsilvering reflections on silence and slow timewith mid-winter car drives and the waiting for what will come from "upheavals" just beyond the headlights as part of an ongoing investigation of the secret patterns of the everyday. Fathers in these stories are seeking to know how to guarantee safe passage to their children through life, but all the attention to fact momentous and small suggests the hope, which it is tempting to see the author share, that strength of mental focus might itself constitute a kind of redemption.

In the last story, "Black Winter," a philosopher retires from an American university to his frozen native city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. In his father's house, daydreaming, he rediscovers a self he thought had long since dissolved in the American academic system, and following a fire that leaves him strangely peaceful, he sits at his desk in a sunny room, bored by philosophical correspondence; as the last paragraph begins he "roll[s] his chair backward, and the momentum seem[s] to carry him over the edge of the snowbound world past the pale of existence."

This is just what many characters in Silent Passengers fear, the possibility that neither mental focus, interior monologue nor philosophy will be enough to keep them from disappearing or being forgotten. "Black Winter," the collection's longest and, for me, finest story, suggests that traveling over the edge (whether of the American border or "the pale of existence") is a positive momentum, taking one both out of life and out of the "snowbound world" that has given so many of the stories here their hemmed-in feeling.

LYALL BUSH Rutgers University

COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning