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Alligator Dance: Stories
With the same piercing vision that distinguishes her novel The River Beyond The World, Janet Peery unveils a stunning collection of stories. Settled mostly in the American Southwest, her characters-men and women caught between two places, literal and figurative-try to understand the mysteries that overarch or undergird their lives.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 20, 2008
Wow. Well done Janet.
May 4, 2011
I'm so glad I didn't read this during my MFA - it would have messed with my head - but I'm so happy I've finally read it. It was the sort of book I hated to see end. Lovely.
January 1, 2019
Excellent character development. Each of these stories drew me in immediately. They were very well-written.
April 20, 2023
Years ago I read a short story by Janet Peery called Nosotros in a Pushcart collection. Ostensibly it was about the relationship between an upper-middleclass Anglo and the daughter of his family’s maid. It said so much, though, about race, class, coming-of-age, without coming off as pedantic or ever forsaking its literalness, the keen eye for detail and pitch-perfect dialogue. That, more than anything else, was what stayed with me: that it had the veracity of real memory, every smell and color described sublime in its evocation.
There was mordancy there, too, though, selfishness, all the ugly human thoughts and feelings and words contrasted against the beauty and mystery of nature. It was Proust and O’Connor—by way of Raymond Carver. It was about as good as literary writing gets.
For no discernible reason I can remember, I decided a month or so ago to break from SF and crime stuff, get back to reading MFA-style works. A lot of this heavily autobiographical stuff can be turgid, a tedious recitation of fond or painful childhood memories written in a confessional style. Done right, as it’s rarely done, it can remind one that no experience is truly insignificant, if rendered with enough care, and sifted carefully enough for meaning.
Alligator Dance has at least two or three stories that can stand next to Nosotros in terms of quality. It has one or two that even surpass that.
The titular story deals with a prepubescent girl’s fascination/disgust with a boy in her classroom. He has a talent (if you can call it that), which consists of drawing a woman on his hand, then pricking two spots on his skin to draw blood. Then voila! The woman has nipples. The story shows how cruelty can come in many forms, and how the one who at first appears cruel can eventually be seen as tragic. It will stay with me for a while.
Waco Wego follows a young girl’s adventures as she tags along with her father, a defense attorney, as he travels to a diner to talk with a client’s mother. As the lawyer and woman converse, it becomes clear that the woman is lying on her son’s behalf, though the father is duty-bound to pretend otherwise. It’s ultimately a curative to the treacly plaster saint Atticus Finch, an examination of truth as an ambivalent thing, rather than as a tool of self-righteousness.
White Wing is my favorite in the collection, outstripping even Nosotros in terms of quality, depth, and meaning. There is something about a tale written by a woman who has considered masculinity down into its core—albeit from the outside—that lets a man see himself in a new way. I suppose there might be some male writer out there who may have written a commensurate story to disprove essentialist arguments cautioning against writing from the opposite sex’s perspective. If so, though, I haven’t read such a story about a woman written by a man. Maybe Peery has sons in addition to a memory like a beartrap?
The collection is rounded out by two stories that examine womanhood—both near the beginning of life and near the end—to poignant and tragicomic effect. There’s Job’s Daughters, about young girls raised in a religious environment who begin to question their faith when their imprecations to God seem to go unheeded. The story is a well-observed recollection that becomes something else entirely as the author dilates time to when all of the girls are full-grown women, with kids of their own. Her words on one’s loathing for their hometown becoming something else as one returns and sees it with new eyes has to be read to be believed. Hunter Thompson used to talk about “The Wave,” that passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which his prose achieved a sublimity it never before or after quite achieved. Peery catches a wave here, and a whole paragraph or two are worth committing to memory.
Then there’s Daughter of the Moon, about an aged woman who has become incontinent and, while popular with the youngsters, has started to alienate the old people around her. Ageing is hard on us all, but especially hard on women. But it seems to be hardest, Peery suggests, on those who maintain some innocence—and even reverence—for both life and the long-dead who preceded them into the unknown.
Still, the story ends, if not on a happy note, then at least a graceful one, one so true and beautiful you don’t even feel like you need hope. Highest recommendation, for those who love short stories.
There was mordancy there, too, though, selfishness, all the ugly human thoughts and feelings and words contrasted against the beauty and mystery of nature. It was Proust and O’Connor—by way of Raymond Carver. It was about as good as literary writing gets.
For no discernible reason I can remember, I decided a month or so ago to break from SF and crime stuff, get back to reading MFA-style works. A lot of this heavily autobiographical stuff can be turgid, a tedious recitation of fond or painful childhood memories written in a confessional style. Done right, as it’s rarely done, it can remind one that no experience is truly insignificant, if rendered with enough care, and sifted carefully enough for meaning.
Alligator Dance has at least two or three stories that can stand next to Nosotros in terms of quality. It has one or two that even surpass that.
The titular story deals with a prepubescent girl’s fascination/disgust with a boy in her classroom. He has a talent (if you can call it that), which consists of drawing a woman on his hand, then pricking two spots on his skin to draw blood. Then voila! The woman has nipples. The story shows how cruelty can come in many forms, and how the one who at first appears cruel can eventually be seen as tragic. It will stay with me for a while.
Waco Wego follows a young girl’s adventures as she tags along with her father, a defense attorney, as he travels to a diner to talk with a client’s mother. As the lawyer and woman converse, it becomes clear that the woman is lying on her son’s behalf, though the father is duty-bound to pretend otherwise. It’s ultimately a curative to the treacly plaster saint Atticus Finch, an examination of truth as an ambivalent thing, rather than as a tool of self-righteousness.
White Wing is my favorite in the collection, outstripping even Nosotros in terms of quality, depth, and meaning. There is something about a tale written by a woman who has considered masculinity down into its core—albeit from the outside—that lets a man see himself in a new way. I suppose there might be some male writer out there who may have written a commensurate story to disprove essentialist arguments cautioning against writing from the opposite sex’s perspective. If so, though, I haven’t read such a story about a woman written by a man. Maybe Peery has sons in addition to a memory like a beartrap?
The collection is rounded out by two stories that examine womanhood—both near the beginning of life and near the end—to poignant and tragicomic effect. There’s Job’s Daughters, about young girls raised in a religious environment who begin to question their faith when their imprecations to God seem to go unheeded. The story is a well-observed recollection that becomes something else entirely as the author dilates time to when all of the girls are full-grown women, with kids of their own. Her words on one’s loathing for their hometown becoming something else as one returns and sees it with new eyes has to be read to be believed. Hunter Thompson used to talk about “The Wave,” that passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which his prose achieved a sublimity it never before or after quite achieved. Peery catches a wave here, and a whole paragraph or two are worth committing to memory.
Then there’s Daughter of the Moon, about an aged woman who has become incontinent and, while popular with the youngsters, has started to alienate the old people around her. Ageing is hard on us all, but especially hard on women. But it seems to be hardest, Peery suggests, on those who maintain some innocence—and even reverence—for both life and the long-dead who preceded them into the unknown.
Still, the story ends, if not on a happy note, then at least a graceful one, one so true and beautiful you don’t even feel like you need hope. Highest recommendation, for those who love short stories.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews