Fresh outlook, bright words: Bob Shacochis' stories fascinate

by James Plath (The Milwaukee Journal, Sunday, March 5, 1989, p. 11-E)

The Next New World. By Bob Shacochis. Crown. 209pp. $16.95

When Bob Shacochis was a Peace Corps volunteer, he served as an agricultural journalist in the Caribbean, the backdrop for his American Book Award-winning short story collection, "Easy in the Islands." This one, his second, may be too divergent to win another prize, but it's still refreshing to read.

Unlike writers who seem preoccupied with their own failed relationships, Shacochis offers more than thinly disguised home movies. He's an inventive storyteller, sensitive to the land and to the past.

"The Next New World" is, in Shacochis' own words, "a potpourri: Alzheimer's disease, a retiree at the beach in Delaware, a North Carolina fish story, a Virginia Civil War story, a story about an Elizabethan production of "Hamlet." Voices, voices, voices, all of it exotic to my mind, but . . . familiar to folks who are homebodies."

If anything, it is an old, familiar world, so familiar that it may well remind you of those adolescent days when reading was an adventure and the words themselves were exotic new discoveries to be confirmed by a dictionary. Shacochis plays the full range of language, scattering words like "thaumaturgically" and "tintinnabulation" among his precise descriptions.

In one such example he writes, "Out the windows, the evening's stridulation of crickets and frogs began to saw at the tranquility of twilight," and when a world-record fish is hoisted to the scales:

"The crowd first saw the mouth rising over the gunnel like upturned jaws on a steam shovel, fixed to sink into sky. People roared when they saw the grisly, bulging eyeball, dead as glass but still gleaming with black wild mysteries."

Two of these stories are reminiscent of Twain, modernized tall tales that display a flair for the spoken language.

"I Ate Her Heart" follows the brief misadventures of a Texas harmonica player, and reads like a parody of a country-western song (Your Eatin' Heart?), complete with literal punch line.

The other, "Squirrelly's Grouper," is an otherwise predictable big-fish yarn that takes an O. Henry turn at the end.

The most successful stories in the collection employ such elements not as trick endings, but as well-integrated symbols.

In "Les Femmes Creoles: A Fairy Tale," two old maids lie naked under a common sheet in their crumbling mansion, living emblems of the South's decay who fantasize about their appeal to men.

In another story, set in Shacochis' native Virginia, an aging Southern patriarch who rides alongside a galloping Mosby in freeway traffic must deal with a bag of Confederate bones before he himself can die in peace. And in "Stolen Kiss," it's a lip print embalmed in paint on a porch rail that provides the twist, as a handyman separated from his wife tries it on for size.

Four of these stories are clear and strong, another well-written but hard to follow, and the two tall tales entertaining, despite their flaws. Only "Trapdoor," the one set in 16th century England, seems so thick and out of place that readers may approach it grudgingly, if at all. In a day's fishing, seven keepers and one that got away is hard to knock.