Ellen Gilchrist (1935–2024)

Fourteen years went by and the Wilsons' luck held. Fourteen years is a long time to stay lucky even for rich people who don't cause trouble for anyone.

I went through it with this short story collection written by Ellen Gilchrist and first published in 1981. I began the collection and was quickly enamored of the voice; it's like Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker were collaborating to have the most terrible things happen to cruel and thoughtless people. And slowly, sometime around the show more fourth or fifth use of the n-word, I felt qualms. 'Maybe Gilchrist is just really committed to using the words her characters, white people living in the South in the 1970s, would have used?' I rationalized, and maybe? It shows up as a descriptive term used by the omniscient narrator as well, so I will say that perhaps some short stories age better than others and there's a reason she isn't much read nowadays. And about the fourth or fifth short story I started to get tired of bad things happening to bad and careless people.

Then, two-thirds through this book about mean people the author clearly disliked, something extraordinary happened. I reached Revenge, a longer short story in which a girl is sent to spend the summer of 1942 in the South with her grandparents and her cousins, all boys, who exclude her from their project of becoming Olympic athletes. She is enraged by their behavior.

I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father's Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.

Rhoda is not exactly a sympathetic character, but Gilchrist here takes the time to inhabit her life so that I understood her frustration with being stuck inside when she really needed to run around outside. It's a great story with a fantastic ending, one that fully respects who Rhoda is. A perfect story and one I don't think I will soon forget. And, in the stories that follow, Gilchrist continues to excel, each story centering a girl unable to conform to what's expected, while still fully inhabiting the prejudices and expectations of her time and place. It's superbly well done.

How to reconcile a book of stories that have aged badly, but that include some brilliant stories? I have no idea. show less

I've put off this review for so long because I was so disappointed in the book that I had to go back and re-read her previous works. My, did this suffer in comparison. Despite its use of 9-11 and the war in Iraq as devices for plot and character development, it felt inconsequential, a strange combination of fluffy and trying too hard. I wept on that September morning, and I have deep feelings that we should never have started the war in Iraq, and yet I felt almost offended by Gilchrist's use show more of these events in what I felt wound up being obvious and almost patronizing ways. It's as if her own strong anti-war feelings overrode her ability to write about them in a way that would persuade rather than badger, or that could show war's horrors and homefront tragedies without shouting about how horrible and tragic they are. Worse, I knew where each character's plot was going before it got there, thanks to what felt like blatant telegraphing. When I finished it, I heaved a great sigh and I returned to The Anna Papers, Victory Over Japan, The Writing Life, and I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy, glad to find there the Ellen Gilchrist whose lovely prose was engaging rather than exhorting, intimate rather than irritating, and who let the reader find her way through, line by line, rather than flashing signpost after signpost to force me to the conclusion that war is bad and life will be forever changed by our losses. That's not a bad conclusion to come to, but it's not a good conclusion to be pushed to. show less

Yet another fantabulous collection of Gilchrist short stories, including a delicious epistolary one featuring Rhoda that had me snorting in shul this morning. Gilchrist is the only writer I know who can make an act of suicide say something about living. Love, love, love and live.

I wish I had not read the previous reviews who disliked the short stories by Ellen Gilchrist, one of my favorite authors. I read the book in one sitting and just drank it all in. Having read most her books it was at times like visiting old friends and to gage how they are doing. I love Rhoda, the younger version and the aging version. I find EG's writing style intriguing and thoroughly engaging and this book no exception. I am not a fan of short stories yet will read the worst of EG and show more enjoy it. show less