Tragedy Is the Aftermath
The title story can in some ways be viewed as a tragedy. A peculiar sort of modern tragedy with a small “t” for sure, but they don’t make tragedies like they used to. The real tragedy of our times is put into context here; how to move on after life delivers disappointment as body blows. The revelation of such tragedy is that it is not the domain of kings and oracles:
“He lived in the way people live, by finding life where he could find it. Which is always easy, for every act justifies itself like a flower, and every day, like the step of a child, is its own problem and its own solution.”
Words Too Late to Take Back
In the collection’s final story, the author provides an effective metaphor for that moment when you have said something out loud that, upon further reflection, you really wish you had the magic to take bad. That feeling of having been on the back side of a decision to open your mouth is described with perfect recognition of the moment:
“…as he said `A man of the world,’ he did not experience that feeling of inner security and relish which customarily was his on like occasions…He slipped the phrase about in his mind as a child sucks candy, but the words were hard and savorless like marbles.”
Character Description
The author is judicious in the use of simile for the purpose of delineating character. When he does engage this comparative device, it becomes all the more effective by virtue of its relative rarity:
“She was a thin dark girl, shrewish and bitter when she did a kindness, as though ashamed to be ensnared in common weakness.”
Violence
Violence is pervasive throughout the stories in the collection. The imagery and allusions range from the obvious to the poetic, but perhaps no single metaphorical image manages to stick it quite like the description of poor old Archie as the consequence of a disastrous encounter between speeding car and the back end of a parked truck:
“They found Archie bunched up in a field with so many bones sticking out of him they said he looked like a mad porcupine.”
“Testament of Flood”
The opening paragraph of “Testament of Flood” illustrates the way that metaphor can be used to kindle fascination in the subject of a story without really actually providing a literal description of the central character. One doesn’t so much as learn her name or anything concrete about her history or situation, but the metaphorical language is handled so richly and with such precise control that interest and tension is built almost without realizing it:
“So dry, she was like those bits of straw or trash lodged innocently in the branches of creek-bottom sycamores as testament of long-subsided spring flood—a sort of high water mark of passion in the community.”
