During the past few years, Mary Robison has won increasing recognition as one of the finest of a new generation of American writers. An Amateur’s Guide to the Night is her second collection of short stories. In addition to her first collection, Days (1979), she has published a novel, Oh! (1981). Six of the thirteen stories in An Amateur’s Guide to the Night originally appeared in The New Yorker. It is not surprising that such a high percentage of Robison’s stories should appear in one of America’s most prestigious markets for short fiction, for Robison’s fiction is at once accessible and highly distinctive. With her precise control of language and her rigorous selection of detail and event, she places the reader in the center of her characters’ emotional lives. Robison found her unique voice at a relatively young age, and in this second collection of stories, that voice continues to develop. She has the ability to write such completely rendered stories—within the confines of her narrative approach—that the widespread assumption about necessary apprenticeship years does not seem applicable to her. Raymond Carver has noted that Robison is one of a handful of contemporary short-story writers who are capable of rendering the world according to their own vision. That vision is tempered by a sense of humor, and although some critics have complained about the bleakness in many of her characters’ lives, almost all have responded to her humor and touches of irony. Among the stories in An Amateur’s Guide to the Night that first appeared in The New Yorker, “Coach” was selected for Best American Short Stories 1982, while “You Know Charles” (previously “Happy Boy, Allen”), first published in The Mississippi Review, was included in The Pushcart Prize, VII. Of the five previously unpublished stories in the collection, two—“An Amateur’s Guide to the Night” and “Look at Me Go”—are among Robison’s best.
Robison generally eschews authorial comment, so that motivation of characters and meaning of event must be deduced largely from what the characters say or from their actions. The advantage of such an approach, and one achievement of the stories, is that her characters and their environments become vividly real for the reader. Robison does not indulge in fantasy or in the morbid and sensational, nor are her stories highly plotted with sharply defined climaxes and epiphanies. Rather, Robison presents a “slice of life”—as in certain stories by Anton Chekhov or Ernest Hemingway—but in a manner that suggests the great complexities of the human world. This approach is very much in the tradition of the American short story, from Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and much of John O’Hara to stories by such contemporaries as Richard Yates and Andre Dubus. The achievement of Robison’s best stories is to make the commonplace significant, to suggest the tensions that lie beneath the surface of everyday life.
In many of Robison’s stories, a character’s natural impulse toward compassion and a sense of meaning is limited or thwarted by his circumstances. Robison’s characters are ordinary people—usually good, decent people, although such a classification would not occur to most of them—who are often confused by the shifting values of contemporary life. They are football coaches, optometrists, high school art teachers, housewives, laborers, college and high school students; they are not intellectuals, and they rarely reflect on the fragmented nature of society. Many critics have found in Robison’s work a sense of disengagement, an anomie that characterizes many contemporary short-story writers—Carver, Yates, William Kittredge, and Ann Beattie to name only a few. Many of Robison’s stories, however, deal with family relationships, and her characters are often compassionate and committed to one another. For the most part, they are not alienated in traditional existential terms but are simply people living common lives in everyday American society.
Robison’s narrative method is to present her stories through several small dramatic sections—often only a page or two, at times less—which suggest the central importance of individual moments in the lives of her characters. In the best stories in this collection—“An Amateur’s Guide to the Night,” “The Dictionary in the Laundry Chute,” “Coach,” “Smart”—these individual moments add up to a revealing portrait of modern society, in which the past and the future are often disjointed from the present. Indeed, Robison suggests that people achieve a sense of meaning in their lives primarily through such individual moments; there is little sense of the past working through her characters and little promise of a future in which those characters will achieve a larger significance in their lives.
The danger of Robison’s method is apparent in such stories as “Nothing’s It,” “Falling Away,” and “You Know Charles,” where her slice-of-life portraits are cut too thin. On the surface, these less successful stories exhibit the deft use of language, the tight structure, and the economical use of detail characteristic of her best work, but at their center, the characters are too fragmented; they do not generate that vital sense of life which is necessary for a Robison story to work. Other writers—Donald Barthelme, for example, or Robert Coover—with different approaches can create successful fictions without that vital sense of character, but Robison’s fiction becomes flat and uninteresting without it.
Because Robison does not directly explore the psychological motivations of her characters, dialogue and action become the focus of narrative attention. A feel for spoken language is one of Robison’s greatest strengths as a writer. Critics agree on the precision of her rendering of speech; the poet and critic Katha Pollitt has said that Robison has the ear of a playwright, and repeatedly in these stories, a telling line of dialogue illuminates the inner world of a character. Many of Robison’s most successful stories are first-person narratives in which the speaker’s voice is unmistakably authentic.
The title story, “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night,” is narrated by Lindy, a seventeen-year-old senior in high school. The story moves forward with incidents presented in a brisk, straightforward, and very readable sequence, as is typical of Robison, and yet the narrative voice is distinctive: Every incident is filtered through Lindy’s consciousness. Her world is limited by her relationship with her thirty-five-year-old divorced mother, Harriet. Lindy and her mother double-date, and on such occasions, Lindy, who is an “old seventeen,” and her mother, who is five feet tall and who “looks young for her age,” pass as sisters. In Lindy’s perception, this situation is not bizarre; she is a levelheaded, vital young woman who is maturing into adulthood without the cynicism typical of many adolescents in contemporary fiction. Hers is a life filled with healthful curiosity—her hobby, astronomy, suggests a larger world of beauty and possibility—and despite the behavior of her mother, who requires periodic hospitalization for an emotional problem, Lindy’s outlook is essentially positive. The “night” in the title connotes the unknown forces that Lindy must eventually confront, chief of which is her mother’s condition, but for the moment, Lindy simply cares for her mother, “mothering” her in a reversal of the normal mother-daughter relationship.
“The Dictionary in the Laundry Chute” explores the parent-child bond from another angle. Margaret Anne, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Ed and Angela, requires psychiatric attention. As she has done in other stories, Robison here treats in an unsensational manner a character suffering from emotional disturbance. Margaret Anne refuses to eat, and her parents’ lives revolve around their attempts to bring her out of her depression. Ed and Angela care, they care deeply, but they are so limited in their own lives that they are ineffective in attempting to deal with their daughter’s problems. A psychiatrist, Dr. Sid Grosh, visits the home to treat Margaret Anne, and his treatment begins to bring her back into the realm of normal life; she begins to eat. Dr. Grosh has assumed the authority that the father, in his pain and confusion, cannot. As the story draws to a close in the middle of the night, with the mother crying in fear and pain over the condition of her daughter, the father wonders aloud: “I don’t see why we aren’t happier and why we can’t all get a little sleep around here.” His plea is indicative of these characters’ lack of control of their lives. That this malaise is expressed in dialogue is typical of Robison’s narrative approach.
In contrast to the ineffectual father in “The Dictionary in the Laundry Chute,” Harry Noonan, the title figure in the story “Coach,” exerts considerable control over his family and over his situation in life. Coach Noonan has recently moved to a college town in Pennsylvania with his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter to become the freshman football coach, a move up after years of high school coaching. Noonan’s attitudes regarding sexual roles are limited: When his daughter Daphne dates a student reporter from the college newspaper, Noonan disapproves because the student does not display the macho characteristics which the coach values—the student is too mature, too comfortable in his own identity for that. Coach makes his disapproval known to Daphne when he tells her that she is wasting her time: “You’d be trying to start a fire with a wet match,” he says. The undertone of sexuality is not lost on Daphne, and she replies, “That’s sick!” Such an exchange is indicative of Robison’s ear for colloquial speech.
Although Robison satirizes Coach’s stereotypical attitude toward male and female roles, she makes his character far more complicated than that of the typical butt of satire. When his wife, Sherry, explains that she feels confined by her role as mother and wife—she wants to rent a studio away from home to paint, to attempt to assume some kind of identity outside the family—Coach agrees to her request and supports her in her efforts. Although he occasionally resents his wife’s ambitions, he keeps his resentment to himself, explaining to his daughter, who fears that her parents are headed for a divorce, that his wife genuinely needs a life of her own.
A number of the stories in An Amateur’s Guide to the Night are quite short, ranging from one to two thousand words. Several of these fail, largely because in them Robison presents characters who call for further development. The tantalizing story “In Jewel,” for example, narrated by a high school art teacher in a small mining town, leaves the reader yearning for a fuller treatment of character and situation; the same might be said of “I Am Twenty-one” and “The Nature of Almost Everything.” All of these stories lack the sense of fulfillment—that “silence [of the] imagination,” in Truman Capote’s words—that one should feel upon completing an outstanding short story. In contrast to these stories, “Yours,” which is only about one thousand words long—three pages—illustrates what can be accomplished in such a demanding form. Here, Robison maintains a distance from the characters, allowing for the kind of objectivity that such a length seems to require. Clark, a retired seventy-eight-year-old doctor, has remarried. His relatives write to tell him that he is being “cruelly deceived.” They assume that Allison, his thirty-eight-year-old new wife, has married for her own gain. Ironically, however, it is Allison, not Clark, who is dying from cancer. At Allison’s death, in a moving moment of pathos, Clark realizes what she has meant to him. It is in such stories that Robison displays her ability to make the limitations of the short-story form work for her, so that the form exhausts the content, and there is nothing left to be said. In such cases, the complexities of the deceptively simple action reverberate in the reader’s mind long after the story has been put aside.
This suggestive power is evident in “Look at Me Go,” a story not quite fifteen hundred words long. The story is divided into two sections: In the first section, the narrator sets the scene. She has come to the beach (the setting is the New England coast) with her fourteen-year-old son, Paul. The narrator recalls an argument which she has had earlier that morning with her husband, a furniture salesman. The husband believes that Paul is a “fraud.” The mother knows that their son is immature for his age, but in her love for him, she is content simply to allow him to be what he is. Paul, who has a “girlish giggle” and who is not muscular, is their only child. Although the husband declares his love for Paul, he is greatly dissatisfied with his son. In the second section of the story, the narrator becomes engaged in conversation with a Russian immigrant who has brought his own son to the beach. The Russian, who has the “big girth and rolling muscles of a laborer,” watches his son and Paul playing, and he comments to the mother that “some kids get big real fast” while “some other kids get to be kids a long time. I think they’re more lucky.” (The phrase “more lucky,” instead of the more idiomatic “luckier,” again demonstrates Robison’s exact ear for speech.) The Russian does not wish Paul to be something other than what he is—he does not view the boy with the aspirations and demands typical of many middle-class parents. In the closing sentences of the story, Robison achieves a kind of lyricism which makes plain language beautiful: The Russian “smiled as though he loved all boys and took pride in them—even mine. He smiled as though he loved me. I let it come, so much love so easy.” This love is not sexual love; it is the love of one human being for another—just for being human. Thus, Robison suggests the compassion that is possible between strangers, the harmony of the world as it sometimes can be.
Many critics have described Mary Robison’s work as “promising,” but in such stories as “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night,” “Coach,” and “Look at Me Go,” she already has attained considerable achievement. On reading such stories, one has that “absolute and final” feeling to which, in Truman Capote’s formulation, the short story aspires.