After an inauspicious literary debut with a volume of forgettable poetry, Cather finds her footing in the field of short fiction. The book contains seven short stories that all deal, in one way or another, with the role of art in our lives. Some of the stories are better than others, of course, but they’re all fine, with the possible exception of Paul’s Case, the final story in the book, which is pretty labored in its exploration of a young student seeking solace from his life of poverty in the local theater. The best of the bunch is A Death in the Desert in which a man visits an old friend who is gravely ill and has gone to Wyoming to die. It has all sorts of strange resonances relating to the triangle of the visitor, who is the less successful of a pair of twins, the dying woman and the absent twin who hovers over the narrative like a ghost. It’s incredibly artful and it’s the one story here that really feels like a fully crafted artistic experience. Less breathtaking, but still very emotionally powerful is A Wagner Matinee in which a young man takes his aunt, who is visiting from the wilds of Nebraska, to a concert of Wagner music; Cather’s writing in this story is at its most intense and vivid as it captures the interior lives of these two characters and the way they are profoundly moved by the music at the concert. The collection is short with just seven stories, right around two-hundred pages, and a pretty quick read. Cather hasn’t totally come into her own, but it’s a vast improvement over April Twilights and has some surprisingly mature writing for an author’s second book. 3 stars.
tl;dr – somewhat variable collection of short stories examine the role of art in our lives; the stories are, at their best, profound and surprisingly mature and, at their worst, still mostly solid. 3 stars.