Am reading a new book of stories by Antonya Nelson called Nothing Right. The setting is mainly small-town Kansas. It's been a while since I read a good book out of the American Midwest, but when I do find one I am grateful. Grateful for the extra pleasure I can bring to such a book by remembering what it felt like to grow up in a similar part of the country.
Here is a brief scene where a mother starts searching for her three-year-old daughter who went off that morning in a car driven by a seventeen-year-old cousin, except that the toddler (Cherry Sue) and the teenager (Kay-Kay) never arrived where they were supposed to. The mother frantically surmises that the seventeen-year-old might have taken the three-year-old to high school with her on a whim.
Two miles away, high school was letting out when Anna arrived. The wind had picked up, and dirt filled the air, trash flattened into the chain link. She drove against the current of muscle cars and trucks surging around her, unnerved by the exuberance with which the teenagers handled their vehicles, their lives. They yelled and honked and screeched their tires, lighting cigarettes and popping up through sunroofs, out back windows, some riding on hoods, dust and exhaust whirling as they revved their engines.
I can perfectly remember inhabiting that scene, but I could never have pulled it out of thin air in just a few words like Nelson does. One of my pet theories is that short stories can more readily be turned into successful movies than novels can. This particular story, called Kansas, practically already is a movie – the velocity, the surprises, the shape.
LATER NOTE: I must be profoundly innocent at heart, because the dust jacket photo with the cactus did not strike me as odd or humorous or particularly comment-worthy in any sense. UNTIL, that is, I checked out the site called JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER – where this dust jacket had been singled out for the weekly feature known as PHALLIC PHRIDAYS.