Minnesota State University Moorhead

Elvis Is Back, Why Not Daddy?

Date: June 6, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final - New York Times Book Review
Byline: By Dorothy Allison;
Lead: RUMORS FROM THE LOST WORLD By Alan Davis. 112 pp. Minneapolis: New Rivers Press/The Consortium. Paper, $9.95. Sample Story.

Text:
FROM the first short story in "Rumors From the Lost World," I seemed to know Alan Davis's people -- haunted stubborn girls craning to see their skinny shoulders in the bathroom mirror, cranky pacing grandfathers obsessed with injustice and calling people fascists in loud grating accents. I've known these daughters who make their mothers retell old stories until the implications of the tales shift and daunt them both; these lovers who refuse to admit the loss of the beloved; raging paranoid veterans and exhausted alcoholics still not sure of their supposed recovery; middle-aged men feeling every day of their age, sure they have been robbed but unable to name the thief; women who stake all their hopes on the guy they knew once who has since made a lot of money. Their voices are real, haunting; their stories startle and draw me in.

"We gonna bushwhack you, bring you back into the world of flesh and blood," a girl's mother says in the story "Tomorrow Is My Dancing Day." She is talking about sex but thinking about meat. The meat is the poor sucker she and her daughter are going to thoroughly chew up and spit out -- that's how they think of him and how we come to think of him, the gullible young man in his Elvis get-up of black velvet pants all spangled with little stars.

It's a joke. He's a joke. The two women could be a joke, but the story swallows us up and turns everything around. The laughter dies down and the grief rises, the tragedy in these lives catches the reader by the throat -- this hopeless young girl and her drug-maddened mother riding the amphetamine highways, more desperate for hope than for cash. Maybe that guy wasn't an Elvis look-alike, the mother suggests. She spins a story she needs to believe more than her daughter: "He hitches these highways all the time, tells us what it's like to live with Jesus, then just disappears, goes back to his mama. I think he's a little lonely these days, honey . . . a little like Jesus."

The girl does not believe her mother but wants to; she is missing her father and dreaming. "On the radio, some preacher is strutting down that sawdust trail, just him and Jesus," Mr. Davis writes. "He wants to save their souls, plunge them into the body of Christ, sail with them to Jerusalem, bottle the mud from the grave of Jesus, heal their wallets so they can grow and prosper, but it's not Sunday yet, it's just Alabama, and if Elvis can come back, so can her daddy."
It is no surprise that Alan Davis was born in Louisiana, writing like that about Elvis and Jerusalem and daddy, but he now lives in Minnesota, where he is chairman of the English department at Moorhead State University, and sets his stories in big cities as easily as in rural towns. Living up to the myth of the Southern writer, he does seem to have a weakness for the almost but not-quite certifiable eccentric, the kind who says things like, "The world is a circle and we're back to square one, babe." For the most part Mr. Davis gets the characters right, making these eccentrics perfectly believable.

ONCE in a while he slips and sketches a little too shallowly. In both "Waiting for Ruth" and "Incoming Rounds," his male protagonists tease us a bit too much, leaving the stories a fraction short of satisfying. But even in those less powerful pieces, Mr. Davis manages to give us women who are dead-on perfect, though they seem almost as frustrated with the men as we are. And more often the characters and stories meld perfectly, the language adding a layer of pensive beauty to these laconic men and women. In "Growing Wings," for example, with young Diane, mourning her sister and checking her shoulders for those wings, Mr. Davis draws as terrible a portrait of grief as I have read in a year, stubborn disciplined grief that does not admit its source.

At her sister's funeral Diane is detached, serene. "They called for her," she tells the other mourners. "The death was painful because she could learn something. And my father didn't feel anything." But every night, unable to sleep, her mourning is an agonized attempt to manufacture something out of nothing, a spiritual insight for the lost. "Don't think, she thought, and blew out her candle. There were places, she decided, remembering her wings and turning to her side, where she wasn't ready to go."

This is a faction that insists on conviction, that argues for belief, passionate belief. I am a sucker for writing like this, people like this. "I wish you all the luck in the world," Alan Davis's people say, hoping you'll go away and not bother them anymore, not in the flesh and not in their dreams. Then they put their heads back and look over at us from under lazy eyelids, a world of story revealed in the things they do not say. Alan Davis's people still listen to "Yellow Submarine" and mourn the death of John Lennon with great sincerity. For them abortions are nightmare-inducing decisions but still the only choice that can be made. Life itself is serious, painfully so. Lovers try again and still miss each other. A family packs up in the dead gray cold of winter and goes hunting for the sun, finding heat only in one another. As in his story "World Poetry Slam," the poets compete with each other before an alcoholic barroom audience, but know that what is really important is not the volume of the audience's applause but the feel of being transported by words and ideas, by the singing of another human voice. Alan Davis's voice transports and sings.

Reading "Rumors From the Lost World," I kept thinking that I wouldn't mind winding up as a character in one of Alan Davis's stories. Odds are, he'd do me justice.

Sidebar: CONSCIOUSNESS RACING (excerpt)
This is a story about Annie. She sent Doug a letter yesterday: "I am not my emotions, Doug. I am not my relationships with others. I am not my ideas. I am not my experiences. I am something else. What, I'm not sure about. But I don't have to be friendly. I don't even have to smile. I'm not trying to exclude you, but to include others. Do you think I'm crazy? If not, please send me some good energy. I need it." In the letter was an owl feather; Doug placed it on the dashboard of his car. There was a P.S.: "My number one priority is racing consciousness. (Can you believe that? I was going to scratch it out and write the word I meant to write, which was raising, of course -- but I thought it too funny to scratch out. Freudian slip.)"
. . . She was always able to recall each of her dreams in detail. I can't remember mine, Doug would complain. "But you're not your dreams, Doug." Playfully scolding, still in another world, she would smile. "You know better than that." -- From "Rumors From the Lost World."