Jul

9

Book ‘Em: An Average Summer Night

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 9, 2007 |

“And like a director, I would call for lights to come on in every house in town, and for every person who had ever lived there to step outside and take a long breath on this average summer night.”

So ends Billy Goats, the first story in Jill McCorkle’s collection Creatures of Habit (Algonquin Books, 2001). Probably best known for novels like The Cheer Leader (Algonquin Books, 1984) and Tending To Virginia (Algonquin Books, 1987), Jill McCorkle’s short stories still shouldn’t be overlooked. This particular collection (she’s written two others: Final Vinyl Days (Algonquin Books, 1998) and Crash Diet (Algonquin Books, 1992)) brings together twelve stories, each one with an animal theme. And yet the theme is often subtle. There are, for instance, no snakes in the story Snakes, no toads in the story Toads, and only one monkey in the story Monkeys.

McCorkle’s stories are like hand-thrown pottery. If you’ve ever watched a master potter at work you know it looks so easy–until you get your own hands on a lump of raw clay. Her materials are simple but sturdy: a drunk couple try to drive out an annoying neighbor by talking about old sitcoms, neighborhood children steal fruit from the garden of a woman who happily gives it away, a man suffering from dementia shows up at his ex-wife’s house, unaware that they’ve been divorced for years and that he remarried. McCorkle always hits the right balance: never too much detail, never too little. They’re perfect reading for an average summer night.


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