West of Phoebe

by Lawrence Judson Reynolds

Genres: Short Stories

Synopsis

This book consists of eight stories; most of which are loosely connected but no attempt was made to follow a timeline or storyline. They are intended to stand alone as short stories. But, most take place in the mythical village of Phoebe in rural Virginia in the 1940s and 1950s. They are all told from the point of view of one narrator, many when the narrator was a child. Children in this time and place were often left to form their own understandings of events taking place around them in the adult world. The story, “My Father’s Necktie,” is representative of the effect on a young boy of his father’s paralysis from a stroke and the family dynamics that resulted. “A Family Tree” deals with the aftermath of World War II on the members of the Phoebe community. The settings of these stories are mostly intimate and domestic; a country store and old tobacco barn converted to a commercial garage for example. “Early Dylan: Five and Ten Cent Women” is about the narrator as he grows older and breaks away from his early life in Phoebe. All of them together form a dynamic picture of growing up in the old South.

Release date: April 26, 2017

Publisher: Square One

Print pages: 208

Sample

Preface

The Lonesome Community of Lawrence Reynolds

by Fred Chappell



The eight stories that make up West of Phoebe by Lawrence Reynolds combine to form a portrait of a place and time in our American experience so familiar that they have become strange. It is as if the daily landscape we know so well, each of us separately and together, were presented in the guise of photographs taken with old Kodaks, or even ancient Brownie box cameras. Familiar but strange—sometimes even spooky:

Was the man with the gun actually there? How did the father’s necktie change into a snake and then into the tail of a kite seeking its freedom in infinity? Is the ambiguous relationship of Raymond Miles and Emmitt Kinds, as revealed in “Proceedings,” describable in words, or is its mystery its whole meaning? Is that relationship, of attraction and repulsion simultaneously, analogous to the one between the storeowner and the man who had robbed her fifty years earlier?

None of the mystery that pervades these stories wafts into them from the universe of fantasy. Reynolds presents his narratives in straightforward, nearly deadpan, fashion. Even his confused, daydreaming teenagers report their experiences in closely factual, personally reportorial, manner. They tell us what they see and when they tell us what they feel, omitting no flush of embarrassment, we know that they describe just what they have observed within and about themselves.

All these stories center upon single individuals and sometimes, as in “That Grand Canyon,” upon a single scene. But the characters’ isolated, tightly knit communities are present with them always. Each place they inhabit, the animals they live with, even the inanimate objects they touch possess histories, and none of them, not even outliers like Dalton Dean, in “The Last of the June Apples,” can be separatedfrom the histories. Sherwood Anderson and ThorntonWilder had the ability to draw a collocation of loners into an emotional community. Reynolds shares that talent.

That grand storywriter Peter Taylor once told me in private conversation that Mr. Reynolds’ stories had “quiet power.” When I tried to pursue the subject he purposely drifted from it, as if he too found it difficult to speak precisely about these natural, preternatural fictions.

To salute, as now I do, the fine and unique achievement of Lawrence Reynolds brings me a large and overdue happiness.