The Stories of Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch’s collection of stories is highly readable, deeply insightful, often surprising, more frequently ambiguous, most of them delicate tales of familial relationships on the edge. He has a way of gradually revealing the true nature of his characters. Though he uses a particular incident as the centerpiece of his stories, Bausch gently prods us to see the way things stand between his principal characters, shows us that the best we can expect in life, relationships is a time of happiness, often a brief one. The very first story in this collection, “Nobody in Hollywood,” made me expect Bausch’s stories to rollick along, be filled with funny one-liners, be told in a chatty style. Instead, most of these tales are spun in the way one who writes with “devotion” would do, gently, inexorably leading us to make conclusions of our own about his characters. Rather than the robust, edgy style he used in writing “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr,” Bausch mainly focuses on the little elements that break down relationships, often using conversation to separate his characters. I’m not sure which type I prefer, because “Belle” is such a terrific story, told in the hard-hitting, raw way Raymond Carver or John Ford might have done, and it stands out as among the best in this extensive (forty-two story) collection. Here’s the ex-con, potentially a dangerous man, driving through west Texas, who picks up a female hitchhiker. Ah, we think, she’s in trouble with this guy. But no, Bausch shocks us with the revelation that she’s actually the dangerous one, a killer, and it’s he who’s in bad trouble. The language is terse, sharp, direct, no-nonsense; the events of the story are jagged, violent. And, perfectly enough, when the protagonist is finally murdered, the event startles us but seems inevitable because Bausch has gradually revealed Belle as a psychopathic killer. But just as effective are the two stories about the Ballingers, “Aren’t You Happy For Me?” and “Not Quite Final” In both, Bausch employs dialogue to move the stories forward. In the first, we have the conversation between father and daughter in which she is trying to break the news that she’s marrying a much older man, that she’s pregnant with his baby. At the same time Jack Ballinger is trying to clue her in that he and her mother, Mary, are separating. Bausch creates multiple conflicts: How will the parents react to this unlikely marriage for their daughter? How will Melanie (their daughter) handle the news of their impending separation? How will the parents negotiate dealing with their daughter’s husband, many years older than they? As Bausch so often does, he puts forth in Louise’s words his own(?) belief that most relationships, even those that ultimately fail, have a few good, perhaps memorable moments of happiness, “’Who knows’, Ballenger’s wife said. ‘Maybe they’ll be happy for a time.’” (Bausch 420). The sequel, “Not Quite Final,” is a gentle, delicate story in which a rapprochement is achieved first between John Ballinger and Melanie’s arthritic husband, William Coombs, as they work together to set up the Coombs’s new household. The turning point comes when Ballinger, seeing that two phone workmen are ogling his daughter and looking askance at her elderly husband, confronts them, “’Just do what you came to do and get out,’ Ballinger told him. ‘That way you get to keep your jobs’” (Bausch 429). It’s as if Jack has shifted his feelings to those of support and empathy for the older man, this guy who has taken his daughter from him. Later, with little looks and small gestures of civility, Bausch shows Jack and Mary Ballinger becoming close again, perhaps even falling in love all over again? We’re not sure. Such is the touch Bausch has with language. They embrace, and he kisses her, “’We’ll wake the baby,’ she said. The phrase sounded so perfectly right, so natural, that he forgot for an instant where he was, where he had been, what processes of dissolution and legal wrangling he had been through over the past months, what loneliness and sorrow,…” (Bausch 437).The majority of Bausch’s tales are introverted discourses, in which one character or another (the narrator in “Letter to the Lady of the House”; Jane in “The Fireman’s Wife” and “Consolation”; Ballinger in “Not Quite Final”; and so many others) examine their relationships, trying to decide whether to stay married or cut the ties. There are little things bothering them, things that, like the drip of a slow leak, over years have eroded the quality of the relationships, so that the characters have lost sight of the things that caused them to love one another in the first place. Bausch tends not to use dramatic events and scenes to accomplish his ends, preferring nuanced conversation and attention to particular details. Bausch is masterful in beginning his stories. A case in point is the opening paragraph of “Someone to Watch Over Me.” His first sentence: “Here are Marlee and Ted, married one year tonight, walking into the Inn at New Baltimore, an exclusive establishment on the main street of this little village in Virginia hunt country” (Bausch 85). Okay, an anniversary dinner in a sophisticated restaurant to celebrate a first anniversary. That sounds very appropriate. Bausch provides people, place, and time in his first sentence. So far so good. Then, with his second sentence, Bausch drops a megaton bomb: “Ted’s ex-wife, Tillie, recommended the place, calling it the perfect surrounding for spending a romantic evening” (Bausch 85). Will Ted tell Marlee? Maybe if he doesn’t, the evening has a chance. But no: “The fact that it was Tillie who did the recommending is something Marlee didn’t know about until five minutes ago” (Bausch 85). Another bomb. Now the scene is set for an evening of conflict, and that’s exactly what follows, and the reader can’t wait to find out how Ted and Marlee deal with this situation. Who wouldn’t want to read on? By the end of the second sentence of the second paragraph, Bausch reveals much about the dynamics of their relationship and exactly how Marlee is reacting to finding out that the evening is not Ted’s idea, but that of his ex-wife: “Ted’s hand rests just below her elbow, guiding her, and she moves a little to step away from him” (Bausch 85). Five sentences into the story, and we already see Ted as patronizing and still connected to his ex, and Marlee as resentful. Let the fireworks begin! Good storytelling grabs the reader from the outset, perhaps even places his sympathy with one character, creates the BIG question, the mess from which the characters will be challenged to extricate themselves. Then what appears to happen is that the storyteller allows his characters to fend on their own. Whether they shoot someone, say one little mean thing, do something stealthy, reveal a secret about themselves, simply botch an opportunity for redemption, or manage to redeem a situation is left up to the characters. The writer steps aside and lets the situation play itself out.

Say your goal is to locate a short story writer in relation to his peers. Start by imagining a map of a valley, with Mount Munro at one end and Mount Carver at the other. Mount Munro, after Alice, is the summit of capacious stories that range widely across time and space, containing fully laid out lives. Inner worlds are slowly peeled back and the reader is led, subtly and inexorably, to a shiver of revelation. At the other extreme, Raymond Carver's brief stories seem found rather than made. The insights come all at once and hit you so fast you feel defenseless, then dazed. The impact lingers long after you've put down the story.The Stories of Richard Bausch lie in the Carver end of the valley, somewhere fairly high up on the flanks of Mount Carver. The guy can write, and, like Carver, he can crack open whole worlds in a few pages. Each story read separately is a gem. Read them in a batch, though, and you may feel that you're stuck in the same bleak place. Bausch writes mostly about men whose lives are spinning out of control. These men seem to lack the something - courage, self-awareness, time, money or energy - they need to step off the entropy express. Individually, the lives are poignant; collectively they're depressing.Which isn't to say there aren't small masterpieces here. Like Valor, about a drunk who saves a busload of kids only to come home and find his wife is leaving him. Or Glass Meadow, a marvelous depiction of what it feels like to be a twelve year old boy, wrapped in a story that's funny and sad and tender and true. Or The Person I Have Mostly Become, about the futility of good intentions, one of the saddest stories you'll ever read. In addition to men, Bausch crafts the emotional worlds of young boys, perhaps an underserved population in current fiction, with a jeweler's precision.What gives these stories their power is, paradoxically, what is also unsatisfying about them: the absence of the implied author. The implied author is the shaping force that sits between the people on the page and the actual person who writes the story. The implied author presents a stance toward the work, which helps the reader to shape their own response. The implied author Alice Munro says to us, "We're going to look at some painful things, but we're going to go about it with dignity and fortitude, and no matter how sad or trapped these people are, neither we nor they will miss the grace notes or succumb to despair." The implied Raymond Carver is a Bogart-like figure, who says, "This is what life is like, my friend, funny and sad all at once, and we have no choice but to stay on stage and play out our part. Let's lift a glass for all the acts of fecklessness and false bravado, toast those ineffectual fists raised against fate."I can't find the implied Richard Bausch, and I can't figure out how he feels about all this despair he's serving up. He seems to be saying, "Here's a bowl of pain soup. I'll step aside and let you eat it. When you're done with this one, I'll serve you another."How you respond to this collection depends upon how many bowls of pain soup you can stand to eat in one sitting.

Richard Bausch is one of the really good "literary" fiction writers of our time. His collection of stories covers many years of his writing. He also is a novelist. I would describe him as a "realist" who writes about family and marital relationships in an honest way. He has had his own demons to contend with, as I understand, so he is able to write with authority about pathological relationships and also about the redemption that we find in the messes of our life. He reminds me a bit of Raymond Carver as far as themes are concerned. But as Carver is considered a "minimalist" I would say that Bausch is a writer whose style is more traditional. As I mentioned, he is a "literary" writer so the general public may not appreciate him as there is no sensational scenes, graphic sex, or magic. But he does give us jarring portraits of modern life in the United States and the pictures he gives us are not always Hollywood endings.He writes about real life and the problems of getting through all the craziness that comes at us. This might be a good book to read to sample his writing, especially if you are considering reading one of his novels.