In the author’s note at the end of Underground Women, Jesse Lee Kercheval explains that some of the stories in this collection are born from her habit of hanging out in libraries with obscure books (some of which appear in this collection). Odd facts inspired her to write about characters abandoned by history or society, many overlooked for most of their lives until someone takes an interest in their welfare. These themes play out over and over here. So much so that I might inspire us to check up on the “characters” we may run across in our own lives.
I enjoyed many of the stories in Underground Women, but here are the ones that really stood out to me:
“A Story Set in Germany.” One of the things I like about stories is that they let us dive into someone’s life in a way we wouldn’t normally be able to. This story is actually told twice. The first version reads like an anecdote someone tells to their friend about that time they took a trip to a foreign country and fell in love with a handsome stranger. In the second version, we get all of the details that are left out of the first telling. These details are the kind that only a very, very close friend would learn, probably after a bottle of wine or two. This story is brilliantly constructed.
“A Clean House.” I am of two minds about this story, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Depending on how you read this one, it might be a story about an elderly woman with severe osteoporosis and failing health finally lets go of the possession and concerns that hold her to her past. Or it might be about the way that, when someone elderly starts to decline or passes away, the next generation ruthlessly clears the slate. My opinion of the story’s meaning changed almost paragraph to paragraph. But then, should it even be possible to sum up a life in a tidy lesson?
“The Dogeater.” Like other stories in Underground Women, this story was previously published. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t fit the collection’s overall theme of misunderstanding and neglect of the old. Also like other stories in this collection, “The Dogeater” starts out looking like one kind of story and ends up being something different. We begin with an elderly man, all on his own, being interviewed about an embarrassing and troubling incident. As the story draws back its veil, we learn that this man is confused about his world but not in the way we expected. There is a method to his madness, one that comes from further away than I could have imagined.
Underground Women begins with “Carpathia,” which Kercheval wrote for a micro fiction exercise. It’s last paragraph hints at what the rest of the collection will be about, but I didn’t pick up on it because of my annoyance at micro fiction (I want more words!). The rest of the stories were much longer. They were long enough for me to settle in and get to know the characters. They have rich backstories that made them seem more real than a lot of other short stories I’ve read. I ended up really enjoying this collection, for all its melancholy.
When I saw the book title, I half expected it to be about women miners….
Sounds like an interesting book though.