Alice Fulton Books

This series of connected short stories by one of America's leading poets demonstrates how an expertise at word choice and sentence-making, a sensitivity to the sound of the spoken language, and the use of idiom to carbon-date dialog, are the perfect tools for the task of writing personal fiction. Fulton's characters are developed almost entirely by what they say, either in dialog or, when they are tasked with narrating, recounting some part of the family history. The stories advance the fortunes and misfortunes of the women in the Garrahan family one decade at a time, and it is primarily the language, as spoken or recounted in thoughts, that evokes the times. For the most part this is a subtle effect, and Fulton is expert at adjusting word and syntax choices to locate her characters exactly in their times and places.
Place is also important to Fulton. The connected-stories structure is too compact to allow much ink to be spent on explication of the setting, the mid-Hudson city of Troy, New York. Instead, we learn about Troy mostly from the characters themselves, or the plot-lines. The women of the Garrahan family seem especially susceptible to a gravitational force that this city, old before its time, apparently exerts on them. (I, too, once lived in Troy, for a few years and as a student, and I can testify that my family, for one, is quite immune to its gravitational pull.)
I recently finished Andrea Barrett's "Servants Of The Map", one of my favorite short story collections of the past few years, and particularly enjoyed the conceit of the "connected" stories. There is a sense of resolution that I experienced reading the last story, the one that more or less ties up the references and relationships that were left hanging in earlier, seemingly unrelated stories. To me it's more than a short story collection - it's a new form of novel.
Alice Fulton's collection is even more straightforward and my new favorite, setting successive stories in successive decades of the Twentieth Century. The opening story is about birth and beginnings, the final story is about death and endings, and a close reading reveals many novelistic devices Fulton employs in the service of the short.
She may be a poet of the higher realms but her prose in this book is muscular and brilliantly appropriate. Beautiful sentences, beautifully crafted, never get in the way of the story she is telling; they just make the reader's experience richer and more satisfying (sorry, I am a recently quit smoker and we talk like that.)
I must add that she is also one funny poet. True, some of the women she inhabits in telling their stories are bereft of humor, but when her character is a woman of wit, she is hilarious.. This is a book that can ascend the heights of wit, and descend into deepest, desperate, darkness of the human condition, and return us to the heights, all within a few stories. I loved the roller coaster ride. Try it out.