Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
News from Everywhere
By Joyce Carol Oates
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
by John Murray
HarperCollins, 274 pp. $24.95
Goblin Fruit
by David Marshall Chan
Context, 214 pp., $23.00
Red Ant House
by Ann Cummins
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 179 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Curled in the Bed of Love
by Catherine Brady
University of Georgia Press,193 pp., $24.95
The preeminent mid-twentieth-century American short story writers seem to us now brilliantly inspired regionalists, though it would have been difficult to see them as such at the time they were writing. The America of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Jean Stafford, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and the young and rapidly ascendant John Updike was exclusively Caucasian, predominantly Protestant, likely to be middle-class conservative if not genteel. Flannery O'Connor, a fiercely partisan Roman Catholic, cast her merciless satiric eye upon the Protestant South, in which her broadly caricatured poor whites and poorer blacks crowd against the property lines of uneasy middle-class whites. Katherine Anne Porter, born to hardscrabble poverty in a log cabin in West Texas, was inspired in time to invent for herself a pseudo-Southern aristocratic background and to establish her own adamant property lines.[*]
Review, 5414 words
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