AFTERMATH, a collection of stories by Scott Nadelson.

Nadelson’s new stories explore how we cope

“Aftermath” by Scott Nadelson, Hawthorne Books, 2011, paperback, $15.95.

By PAUL HAIST, Jewish Review

article created on: 2011-11-15T00:00:00

I found it difficult to lay aside Scott Nadelson’s “Aftermath,” the new and third collection of short stories by the writer who lives today in Salem.

The former Oregon Book Award Winner’s prose is elegant in its unpretentiousness. The depth of his insight is stunning. The breadth and detail of his knowledge of the ordinary lives of men and women in widely varying walks of life is astonishing.

One scratches one’s head and asks, for example, how this quiet young writer could know the details of laying sewer pipe through a former landfill and how the men who do it talk to one another. He does this with impressive skill while also probing the outwardly unlikely emotional depths of a backhoe operator and his foreman.

In reading these beautifully crafted stories and getting to know each of Nadelson’s vividly drawn characters, I also found it difficult not to despair for the condition of man. “Is this all we can hope for?” I asked myself after watching how each of his central characters dealt with a dramatic change in the direction of their lives and how, in the end, they were largely unchanged.

That is the source of the collection’s title, “Aftermath,” how we cope with change, both inside ourselves and in our relationships with those who are closest to us—our spouses, our lovers, our family—and the occasional stranger whose sudden appearance in one’s life clicks or resonates in an unexpected way, as in the story “Saab” in which a man who has lost and walked away from everything encounters a woman—a slum lord’s rental agent—in somewhat similar circumstances, with bizarre results.

The story from which the collection takes its title focuses on the trial separation of Richard and Alana Weintraub after seven years of married life in suburban New Jersey—the setting for most of Nadelson’s stories and his childhood home.

Like most of the stories in this book, and despite all that has happened from its first page to its last page, little has changed for the central characters at story’s end. It is a day when the couple is together again and Alana offers Richard a brief and clumsy intimacy, a kiss on his jaw.

In that instant Richard takes heart in the gesture as “the best he’d get right now, and for now it was good enough.”

That’s pretty much how all the stories in this book end, which I found disappointing, but not as bad storytelling. I was disappointed because it seemed spot on—how life usually is, when I want it to be something else, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Earlier in the same story, on moving day, when Richard leaves his home and wife, he recalls a comment his father-in-law—a greatly underappreciated and impoverished installation artist—once made. “The purpose of art,” the old man had told him, “was the same as that of dreams—to broaden the scope of experience, to let people live lives they’d otherwise never be able to imagine.”

Richard, a high school art teacher and lapsed painter, treasured the observation, even though the old man later disavowed it; he had been drunk when he made the remark.

The comment goes to the center of this collection of stories, but I think not quite as it was written, not quite as the old man may have meant it when he spoke it, but is implicit when one weighs the apparent intent of the comment.

In the context of the aftermaths illuminated in Nadelson’s stories, the truth of the comment may lie in its error: By and large we do not live lives that we imagine or dream and, in fact, we settle for the best we can get right now and accept that as good enough. Things could be worse.

But then there’s Amy Markowitz, the central character in “West End,” the last story in the book, who on passing one last time through the setting for the story of her aftermath fixed her eye on the road ahead, which happened to head west, and she did not look back.

Which I think suggests what most of us do; we move on and hope for a brighter tomorrow, even though we know what we know.

In “Aftermath,” Nadelson goes to the center of our experience in that way. If the journey often seems bleak, it is not without hope.

You never know.