Review: Story in search of its own particular audience
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 15, 2011
Roberts' world in a "Hazy Shade of Winter" is a place where instead of writing a letter, people "pen" a note. The wind instead of being from the west is "errant." Fields don't get watered they get "hydrated." People don't wear a false face but instead present a "mannequin faade."Roberts has created a time and place overwrought with emotion and stuffed with all things lyrical. For sure it isn't Hemingway's world.Here, stripped of the lyricism, are some of the story details: It's 1965. Blaine isn't doing too well at Wellesley. She has a problem relating to the other students. Blaine gets shipped out to a psychiatric hospital where lithium is prescribed to even out her moods. She feels she hates her mother. Her mother visits. Blaine attempts to strangle the woman with her own paisley scarf. Blaine is removed to a treatment room and wrapped in a cold (48 degrees F), wet sheet until her lips turn blue. The cold-water treatment leaves Blaine with nerve-damaged feet.She has always written poetry, beauteous poetry. Her poetry is published to great acclaim. She meets a young short story writer. They have sex. The relationship ends.At one point we find Blaine lying in a field of decomposing leaves, which remind her of death. She looks up and watches clouds scattering in a "curious dispersing across the forever wide firmament." Now she's driving in Aunt Betty's car and it's storming and  "waves of rain" wash across the roof in a "metallic staccato beat." Blaine is heading toward the story's foreshadowed conclusion.In Geraldine Brooks' introduction to "The Best American Short Stories of 2011," Brooks says she was looking for stories that simply are good at telling a story. She says stories, for her, should be so "taut they twang."I wanted "Hazy Shade of Winter" to grab me with the narrative. That's my bent. I wanted to be a little more clear about what the author was trying to accomplish. Instead I got hung up more often with the soaring emotion and bogged down with broad adjectives.Stories like these cry out to be workshopped. Someone needs to read and offer some helpful criticism to the author before the story ever sees the light of day. This story also serves up another good reason why editors are an essential cog in the literary process.Written mostly in the third person, the story might have had more impact as an interior monologue. Roberts writes in a style that occasionally sparks with flair. Overall, though, it's a style that seeks its own particular audience.