Will She Understand?: New Short Stories

by Fielding Dawson

Written in New York between 1982 and 1987, the short stories in Will She Understand? bring us up to date with Fielding Dawson's work since the publication of Krazy Kat & 76 More, Collected Stories 1950-1976 and Virginia Dare, Stories 1976-1981. Reviewing Krazy Kat, the San Francisco Chronicle's critic compared the work favorably with Hemingway, Cain and Chandler, and suggested that "Dawson makes his foreground study that underbelly of society which the hard-boiled school had described only as backdrop."

In these thirty-two new stories, Dawson confirms and extends his mastery of a form he helped invent: the projectivist tale, in which a heightened sensitivity of attention registers in hair's-breadth detail not just physical realities but emotional events occurring in transformational, dreamlike, intuitional dimensions way off the tone-scale of the old, tired English narrative sentence.

Genres: Fiction

180 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1988

About the author

Fielding Dawson was an American author of short stories and novels, a painter and collagist, and a student at Black Mountain College.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may have been the book most responsible for me wanting to be a short story writer when I was young. Dawson's experiments in language and form blew my mind when I was in high school, and the ironic quality of his straight-forward work was great. It had a very serious, non-joking sort of irony that is rarely found today.

[Austin Houlgate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up in Sonoma County (Windsor), has given me a great love for Black Sparrow Press, the independent publisher that began in Los Angeles and made its way to Santa Rosa. A publisher of "modernist" prose and poetry that championed maverick authors that would go on to become many of my favorites--Berlin, Coleman, Fante, and yes, Bukowski.
Fielding Dawson is an author I have been able to find a few collections of (The Trick, and The Sun Rises Into the Sky). I have sampled a few stories from each, but never found myself falling for Dawson's prose. Will She Understand? was a great surprise, when, sampling the second story, "The Reason," I got smacked with a short, clear, punctuated story about watching Miles Davis in the early days. The collection would continue on with several sparkling stories about jazz and legendary musicians form the perspective of the fan and spectator. Great too are the stories memorializing what must have been dear relatives, the "Novel, in Outline with Notes" (again emphasizing the revelatory power of jazz), and dreamy musings on the down-to-earth or up-in-the-clouds experiences of writers. Dawson keeps the stories mostly moving, dialog-driven (and refrains from authorly speech, keeping his characters real), and vibrant with color and visuals, but sometimes drifts into the dreamy and imaginary. Some of the fragments are less successful, in that they lack any real memorability, but overall this is a strong and maybe more accessible collection of stories from a mature writer.