Thirteen Stories, by Eudora Welty
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979
Eudora Welty has a great talent for capturing the essence of being a rural southerner in the early 1900s. The stories in this collection provide the reader with a candid glimpse into the lives of slaves and common townswomen, as well as vagrants and members of the upper class.
Welty's stories work best when they simply follow their characters over a day- (or week-) long event, and Thirteen Stories includes some very memorable characters.
In "The Wide Net," we watch a group of men drag a river for the one's wife who had threatened to drown herself. In "Petrified Man," we are flies-on-the-wall of a beauty parlor where a group of women gossip about their men, each other, and a recent circus exhibit, the story's namesake. My favorite of all the tales was "Moon Lake," which brilliaintly recounts the tangled thoughts, relationships and emotions of a clique of young girls at a summer camp.
I found this collection to be uneven at times, particularly when Welty is trying to use abstract form or extremely self-aware voices and characters to convey her message.
For example, in "A Still Moment," characters appear out of nowhere to befuddle a disturbed Lorenzo Dow who is on a 'quest for souls' along the Old Natchez Trace. It is never made clear whether Dow is truly the Grim Reaper (although Death is referred to as a separate entity at times) or simply a delusional man. An outlaw who believes he is an instrument of the Devil, and a young Audubon are thrown into the picture, with each character's thoughts exposed in a long montage of vague ramblings.
"The Bride of the Innisfallen," too, is difficult to get through as the reader is bombarded with many characters holding several concurrent lines of conversation in one compartment of a passenger train. On a positive note, Welty accurately manages to convey the excitement and camaraderie of the passengers at a time when rail was the way to travel.
Welty has long been a staple in the category of highly-regarded Southern writers, and rightly so. She is a southerner who wrote about the types of people she saw around her, passing no judgement while painting a picture of the times in words that will touch readers for centuries to come.
