All My Relations: Stories

All My Relations: Stories by Christopher McIlroy. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1994. 189 pages. $19.95.

The eight stories in this impressive collection, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, are distinguished by stylistic precision, diversity of subject, and a subtle authenticity in the mapping of the postmodern psyche. The terrain, geographical and human, is chiefly that of Tucson and its sprawling environs, and the tone is often a fin-de-siecle ennui. Characters endeavor to chart their locations against and semiotic surfaces and to take charge of their lives.

One of those who almost succeeds is the Pima protagonist of the title story, Milton Enos. Having lost his wife and son through his alcoholism, Milton signs on with a crusty, Emersonian rancher, Jack Oldenburg, who embodies both the frontier ethic of strong character and its corollary ruthlessness:

Milton, I hope you're not bitter because I won't let you drink. Drawing

the line helps you. It's not easy living right. I've tried all my life and

gained nothing--I lost both my sons in war and my wife divorced me to

marry a piece of human trash. And still, in my own poor way, I try to

five right.

Milton's excursion into sobriety and hard wage earning in a natural environment does restore his self-respect, sexuality, and native spirituality. His girlfriend and his welfare-addicted former comrades poke fun at his "marriage" to the old white man, and their cake-baking relationship does flirt with Leslie Fiedler as much as with Robert Bly, but he ignores his taunters except for one lapse into drunken violence during which he loses a symbolic finger. Sadly, celebrating his family's imminent return, Milton ties one on and is fired, against their mutual interests, by the implacable Oldenburg: "It would be wrong for me to break my word. You'd have no cause to believe me again and our agreement would be meaningless."

Milton deteriorates and the future of his son is ambiguous. Milton's own childhood was drenched in violence. The unfashionable significance of the title may be that one's solution sometimes demands separation from one's origins. At certain junctures the story recalls the acclaimed recent film of Maori life, Once Were Warriors, and that elegy for wildness and its mal-contents, The Misfits. More than these, however, it eschews sociological cliches.

In a more satiric vein, the investment-opportunities salesman of "Hualapai Dread" is assigned the less-than-promising territory of an unemployment-stricken reservation in the aftermath of the 1987 crash. A white man without memories, traditions, or morals, he discovers that the nobly savage college girl after whom he lusts is in fact a considerably older woman cloaked in elaborate fictions of her own spinning. The title is the name of a tribal reggae band in solidarity with Nelson Mandela, truly a third-world coalition. The epiphany is that ". . . you're not the same person. You're starting clean, you're cut free from the drag of the past . . . and then it turns out you're in history all along, yours and everybody else's." Perhaps because they've been told either that they cannot or should not do so, many male authors seem to be hazarding the female point of view these days. In "The March of the Toys," a young woman does make a better fife for herself once she quits trying to shoulder the burden of her relatives and friends. The story is the most politically orthodox of the lot.

"In a Landscape Animals Shrink to Nothing" involves a couple on the verge of estrangement in the most lethally decadent tropical beach resort since Suddenly, Last Summer. "The Big Bang and the Good House" details the socioeconomic pseudo-structure of the New Southwest, and "Builders" is the terminal nightmare of the Dream House turned marital sarcophagus. In symbolic prose typical of McIlroy's meticulous style, "The engine's stuttering roar, the torn roots and glittering mica rushing by his face, were an overturned world in which he was alone, his family beyond reach." In the heart of this nuclear family's darkness, the reader may come to inspect his or her own life's underpinnings.

All our relations are indeed examined in these tales. McIlroy casts a cold eye on the white center and the multicultural margins. He trusts his own perceptions and limns them with a firm and independent hand.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Studies in Short Fiction
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