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Without You
Fiction seeks the truth. What underlies conflict? What values can we relate to and what are the risks? And how, really, does the world work? Short fiction does the same, with closely-observed details, effortless dialogue, and familiarity
It’s the little things that make a short story into a big story. It’s the details and the intimacy. It’s the skillful knowing of the their courage, obstinacy, fears, and resilience. In these stories we meet Josephine in Pal Jo and Linda in It’s a Long Time Pull, both holding to optimism like drowning sailors to flotsam. Amory, the man being robbed in an elevator in To Sketch a Thief is surprisingly and enchantingly thrilled by the encounter. The three bad boys in Lights Out are frightened into goodness by the 1965 Northeast Blackout, and Hank, the bicyclist in Down, Down, Down, Into the Valley of the Snake is startled by loneliness into clinging to his marriage.
Elizabeth Morris’s characters are sometimes racist or lonely or fat or confused or awesome, but always complex and both intuitively and authentically imagined. They are easily believable.
Many of these stories take place on or near the water. A child pokes among rockweed to find periwinkles; a New England divorcee concentrates on a limpet’s slime trail; ocean swells roil against cliffs on a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean; and off the coast of an island in the Aleutians in rough seas, a birdwatcher keeps his hand clamped to the gunwale of a small aluminum skiff.
Morris, a long-distance sailor, knows the sea and knows when to keep the foreground of her stories in the front and the background astern.
It’s the little things that make a short story into a big story. It’s the details and the intimacy. It’s the skillful knowing of the their courage, obstinacy, fears, and resilience. In these stories we meet Josephine in Pal Jo and Linda in It’s a Long Time Pull, both holding to optimism like drowning sailors to flotsam. Amory, the man being robbed in an elevator in To Sketch a Thief is surprisingly and enchantingly thrilled by the encounter. The three bad boys in Lights Out are frightened into goodness by the 1965 Northeast Blackout, and Hank, the bicyclist in Down, Down, Down, Into the Valley of the Snake is startled by loneliness into clinging to his marriage.
Elizabeth Morris’s characters are sometimes racist or lonely or fat or confused or awesome, but always complex and both intuitively and authentically imagined. They are easily believable.
Many of these stories take place on or near the water. A child pokes among rockweed to find periwinkles; a New England divorcee concentrates on a limpet’s slime trail; ocean swells roil against cliffs on a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean; and off the coast of an island in the Aleutians in rough seas, a birdwatcher keeps his hand clamped to the gunwale of a small aluminum skiff.
Morris, a long-distance sailor, knows the sea and knows when to keep the foreground of her stories in the front and the background astern.
186 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 8, 2012
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October 20, 2017
Beautifully written and engaging stories about a wide variety of people and places. Many of them will make you nostalgic for earlier times, even if those times are only 20 years ago. One of the highest accolades I can give to a piece of writing is to compare it to the articles you see in the New Yorker, which at first glance may not interest you, but the writing is so excellent and compelling that you get hooked after very few sentences. The stories in Without You are like that. You want to read further as soon as you start them. One of the stories, "Vincent Under the Bed," is one of my all time favorites. Just masterful.
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