REVIEWS Strange Love
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REVIEWS Strange Love The School of Love by Phyllis Barber defies conscious expression — love that (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, wells up from the subconscious and that 1990), 113 pp., $14.95. we only half recognize. Barber's dual epigraph, "God is love" Reviewed by Helen B. Cannon, USU (1 John 4:8) and "Love is strange" (Sonny English Department, Logan, Utah. and Cher), points to her indefinable mix DISPARATE VOICES OF contemporary of the sacred and the profane, the rar- short story writers, among them Alice efied and the downright strange. Take the Munro, Margaret Atwood, Raymond story "Tangles" for instance. The nymphet Carver, Louise Erdrich, and even Mor- child, Alice, sleeps with her teddy bears — mon author Linda Sillitoe, all use exter- palpable bears of gray and brown and nal situations to probe the inner life of white. The white bear even has a music characters. All are authors busy with box inside. And Alice's father is real nuances of the craft, sharing at the very enough too —no dream daddy at all, but least a concern with characters in credi- one who types and scolds and gives ble, if sometimes minimal life situations. advice, and whose balding head Alice In this reading context, I found Phyllis kisses. But what of the figures who are Barber's collected stories in The School of less certainly real? There is the man who Love to present eccentric, strange territory follows her home from school and who in the land of current fiction. Though reappears at various points in the story. many of her stories begin in the "real" He wants to touch her golden hair—to world, they drift into a landscape of dream braid it, she thinks, into a cord and to and fantasy — worlds where the familiar lead her away. What part of this man with suddenly becomes unfamiliar, where "yolky" eyes is real, what part nightmare, sanity approaches madness, where time what part a girl's surreal conception of warp defies chronology, where known the men her father says "only want one intersects with unknown, and understand- thing"? Is he archetype or actual; sinister ing takes on private symbology that calls or holy? One moment (in dream or in for translation. Yet we've all traveled in reality) the man narrows his unnatural these realms not real, and they reflect in eyes to scream, "Respect for the man"; an eerie way the deepest of our personal the next moment he is kissing Alice's realities. cheek, kneeling holily and whispering, Many people read fiction to learn "Love one another," and then, Christ-like, about human behavior; Phyllis Barber's lifting her up while reassuring her, "Be stories call upon us to learn about the not afraid" (p. 22). human heart — especially about our own Here is a girl on the brink of sexual hearts. That's why, the more I think about love, frightened, confused, mixing the lit- it, her title seems entirely apt, even though tle girl love she's known with mysteries of when I first read the collection I won- sacred love and with the equally strange dered. Surely someone looking for con- adult love to which she now must be ini- ventional boy-meets-girl romance would tiated. The only male/female love she's find the title puzzling, if not misleading. known till now has been for her bears For here we are schooled in love that (who all seem to be Teddies) and for her 174 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT father — all of this getting bizarrely mixed must be engaged in the intricate weaving up in her rite of passage. We're told that process, must add their own strands to Alice joins the circus. We're told that The the warp of fantasy, the weft of reality. Dwarf there fondles her with his "nubbed Though Barber's stories in their wild digits," "kneading" and "tweaking" imaginative flights defy ready classifica- between her legs until The World's Big- tion, each does have commonality with gest Lady interrupts and they go back to what Carlos Fuentes has called the their game of canasta. Violation seems to "privileged" language of fiction — provid- happen in a stuffy tent, or does it rather ing access to life centers that we do not happen in a nightmare enactment of and cannot read discursively. People who Every w o m a n ' s fears? At one point in the choose not to understand fiction deny its story, we do know for sure that Alice has unique psychic language — symbology that crossed the line between sleeping and wak- can bring us a deeper understanding of ing. In this identified dream-vision, Alice's things we may not always want to hear, father becomes one with the bears, his helping us to discover qualities and mean- mechanical wind-up words proclaiming, ings not always apparent even to our- "I love you most of all" — something per- selves. Another commonality is that all haps most every girl subconsciously wishes central characters are girls or women could be true —that love could be for a involved in a quest for some aspect of known and gentle father rather than for a love —females in archetypal stages of love. strange and threatening man. Each of the stories in this collection This father/daughter motif appears in deserves separate and close analysis: each two other stories in Barber's collection — deserves time and engagement. Meanings "Silver Dollars" and "The Glider" — where are not readily or conventionally accessi- it is again clear that father love goes ble but require tapping of our deeper, beyond filial devotion. This archetypal sometimes suppressed sensibilities. While theme is not one that women freely dis- the story "Tangles" is unique within this cuss or even consciously admit; it brushes set of unique stories, it does typify some too close to the taboo. But it does well up aspects of the whole. In "Silver Dollars" as a familiar in Barber's impressionistic and in "Tangles," we see teen girls on the tales; at least it did for me. Other readers brink of passage to womanly love, trying will find their own meanings; Barber to use father love as a model, yet trying demands that sort of reader participation. to break away from that familiar love as She says as much in her artistic credo well. In "Love Story for Miriam" and in ("Mormon Woman as Writer," Dialogue, the brief impressionistic piece, "Almost Fall 1990), implicitly embracing as her Magnificence," we see spinsters who for own goal, Mario Vargas Llosa's descrip- one reason or another have been denied tion wherein "the truth (one or several) is the passage to romantic love. In "Baby hidden, woven into the very pattern of Birds," we observe mother-love that is the elements constituting the fiction, and unstinting. "Anne at the Shore" (a won- it is up to readers to discover it, to draw, derful self-creation myth), "Criminal by and ... at his own risk the ethical, Justice," and another mere glimpse, social and philosophical conclusions of the "White on White," all explore self-love story" (p. 110). This accurately describes thwarted, discovered, or created, and in Barber's own method. In her Dialogue the three thematically related stories, essay she reiterates that "much of the bur- "Radio KENO," "Oh Say Can You See," den of interpretation lies with the reader and "The Argument" (another fragment), who will make out of words what he or we read of love that has run amok in she wishes" (pp. 112-13). If Barber's sto- motive and manifestation. ries, so wondrously diverse and imagina- Again, Barber's discussion of her own tive, have a formula, it is this —readers technique defines her approach as can-.