Girls in the Grass

Rating:
Summary: Stories of uncommon depth and style: A new standard
Review: Now that I've read Melanie Rae Thon's GIRLS IN THE GRASS, I know what's possible from truly great short stories--and there's no reason to settle for anything less.

I first read one of Thon's stories, "Iona Moon," in a small literary magazine a few years ago. Used to short fiction that lacked engaging plots, complex characters, and that left me ultimately dissatisfied, I was startled by Thon's sustained, narrative energy, bold characters, and lyrical prose. But there was something else that, at the time, I couldn't quite identify--now that I've read her collection, I realize that Thon is a writer with a moral vision out of which she creates characters of great vitality and vulnerability who struggle with questions of faith, guilt, power, desire, redemption, love. For me, this kind of depth and craft makes reading short fiction incredibly rewarding.

A few examples--There are three best girlfriends in Thon's title story, "Girls in the Grass," teasing with the pleasures and confusions of sexual desire and friendship. There's the twelve-year-old girl in the chilling story "Punishment," who is haunted throughout her lifetime by her complicity in the hanging of a slave in 1858 on her family's plantation. There's the young girl in "Repentence," whose resentment of her senile grandmother leads her to discover her own wickedness and desire. There's the aging male professor in "Small Crimes" whose clumsy seduction of a promising, younger woman poet opens up her painful, revealing past.

Each story is in itself fully realized, but each gains meaning and power from its arrangement in the collection.

Beautifully crafted and large in their scope and emotional complexity, Thon's stories offer readers a powerful, transforming experience.

Rating:
Summary: No TKO, but...
Review: The majority of stories that make up this collection by one of Granta Magazine's "Top 20 American Novelists Under 40" are weak and more than a little doe-eyed in comparison to the gritty, moving tale that appeared in the Granta issue. The tales that do work best all seem to feature a recurring figure at their center, the title character of Thon's later novel, Iona Moon. Given the time that a novel's length allows, Thon can transform the quaint into the unrecoverably beautiful, develop a pang into an ache, but most of these pieces don't seem to quite stand by themselves. After all of this less than complimentary talk on my part, let me say that, given the strength of the Granta piece, I definitely plan to check out her soon-to-be-released collection, "First, Body"