Lit: Why the Devil Chose New England for His WorkTheo Schell-Lambert weighs in with a review of Jason Brown's new book of short stories, out now in paperback:
The title of Jason Brown's Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work promises the text as a collective explanation. Here, in this "linked collection" (all tales have roots in the fictional Vaughn, Maine), we'll find evidence of some native Northeastern immorality, or at least a special inclination to fall. The devil might not demand evil as a prerequisite, but he'd surely want a people who could be swayed.
Brown's characters don't disappoint. These stories are riddled with freak accidents and catastrophes, mostly of a bleak New England stripe: a shopkeeper falling through the ice at a pickup hockey game; a father sinking his sailboat and slipping away in front of his son. This persuades us, at first, that we're facing simple tragedy—a chilling but morally innocent concern. The problem is actually far worse. In "The Plains of Abraham," the apparent drowning of a wayward son, Henry, at his father's retirement party seems trauma enough, but it gives way to a host of more personal evils. Henry survives to recount an implicit childhood rape—and to inflict the grown-up torture of never telling his parents he escaped the water. In "The Lake," another drowning still isn't the most appalling event. Instead, we're made privy to a horrific indifference. The lone witness "could not remember feeling anything when Franklin disappeared."
Yet for all these cruelties, at no point do we feel like we're witnessing truly bad folks. Even the severe ethical lapses seem forgivable—well, understandable—because they're so evidently a product of the landscape. And this is how Brown's brazen pairing—a post-industrial, late-20th-century Maine made akin to Nathaniel Hawthorne's old doomed terrain—yields rewards. Modern Vaughn is wrought with a quiet despair than runs to fatalism: a Puritan town's sense that whatever can go wrong, will.
This infects the storytelling itself, as it must. We're not always made sure where the real and fantastic part, for these characters are done with worrying the difference. If the worst hasn't happened, it's surely about to. By the end of "Dark Room," a woman with an allegedly wayward, possibly abusive husband doesn't even bother to help a counterpart sort fact from fiction. "'It's true,'" she says. "'Whatever you heard is true.'" This seems to be why the devil would pick New England: he knew they'd supply the nightmare scenarios themselves. (Theo Schell-Lambert)
WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK
By Jason Brown
Open City
284 pages, $14
www.opencity.org/whythedevil
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