My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories

The Upper Midwest, with its scattered small towns and bitter winters, is Carol Bly's source for stories that are, as Tobias Wolff says, "as particular in their settings and culture as those of Turgenev and Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, and as far from being simply regional."

My Lord Bag of Rice collects Bly's best and most recent work, 11 stories fortified with sharp-eyed characters who stand a little apart from their routine, stolid lives, nurturing hardy seeds of self-worth in a mostly mediocre world. Tinged with humor, her stories always portray Midwesterners - and people in general - who manage to cultivate a sense of greatness in their lives.

Two new stories round out Bly's collection, which otherwise comprises nine tales from her first, breakthrough collection Backbone, and from The Tomcat's Wife. All set in the same small Minnesota town, the tales feature ordinary characters who challenge their bland, provincial surroundings by revealing laudable, even heroic quirks of personality and perception. The reprinted stories provide ample psychological context for the two new ones. In "Renee: A War Story," an unnamed narrator evokes the trauma and uncertainty of sixth grade, exploring her admiration for a remarkable classmate. Renee is better than any boy at softball, gaining the respect of even the bully. But the narrator detects something unhealthy about Renee, romanticizing the athlete's dark under-eye circles and thin body until she gets a glimpse into Renee's dreadful home life. Bly's tone is wistful; the off-screen violence lurks, but is never directly confronted. "Chuck's Money," in contrast, has all cards on the table: when bookkeeper Leona finds a dead body, she notes the odor: "I am smelling Chucky's brains." The boy is "the son of the richest big shot in town," and when no-nonsense Leona exposes the wealthy man's hypocrisy, she also learns a poignant truth about her own humble husband. The good-guy/bad-guy theme recurs throughout these tales, with bullies taking shape in virtually all of them. But Bly has a gift for making flawed, spirited people endearing, and many of her characters are heroic because they've become heroes to themselves. (Apr.)
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Rooted in Minnesota, Bly's stories portray small-town folks grappling with each other's shortcomings and disappointments, if not downright cruelty and despair. As her characters consider both the tedium and the satisfaction of modest lives and confront upheaval and death, Bly tests the unwavering teachings of the church against the wholly unpredictable teachings of life, carefully separating the emotional from the moral, the desired from the real. Outstanding stories from two previous collections, Backbone (1985) and The Tomcat's Wife (1991), feature such intriguing figures as a lonely mortician who has trained himself to repress his feelings and manipulate his customers but who hasn't given up on love; a woman who watches her husband all but worship a seemingly together new neighbor whose life is actually in serious disarray; and a mechanic's widow who opens a boarding house in the hope of fashioning a more refined existence. All of Bly's stories are vital and beautifully crafted, and her new stories, especially the sinewy "Chuck's Money," reveal more about human nature than most novels. Donna Seaman