Where the Light Falls

Starred review from July 15, 2019
Esteemed in her lifetime but largely forgotten today, short story master Hale (1908-1988) gets a welcome reintroduction in this collection of 25 astute, finely wrought tales. Novelist Groff, who made the judicious selections, also provides an introduction sketching the writer's background: Born into Boston's Yankee aristocracy, the daughter of bohemians without a lot of money, Hale was a debutante who cast a cold eye on the class she came from while enjoying its glamorous accoutrements. The early stories from the 1930s and early 1940s have backgrounds that would have been familiar to Fitzgerald: coming-out parties, jazz orchestras, Ivy League athletics, fast driving in fancy cars. Yet they paint quietly acid pictures of Southern snobbery ("That Woman"), male dominance masking fragility ("Crimson Autumn"), and ethnic tensions in summer communities ("To the North"). Hale is rarely overtly political, but two stories from the '40s, "Those Are as Brothers" and "The Marching Feet," stingingly make the point that fascism has home-grown versions. Long before the feminist movement was reborn, she acknowledged women's ambivalence about having children ("The Bubble") and the potential oppressiveness of marriage ("Sunday--1913"). Hale's personal experience of mental illness sparks some of the collection's best work: "Who Lived and Died Believing" expertly blends a harrowing account of electric shock treatment with a sharp portrait of a kind nurse's romance with a callous resident; "Some Day I'll Find You..." and "Miss August" both anatomize intricate social interactions in psychiatric sanatoriums, the former with a comic touch, the latter in a darker tone. Hale's prose is elegant without calling attention to itself, like the well-cut dresses one is sure her female characters wear. There's a slight slackening in some of the later stories, but not in "Rich People" (1960), a marvelously complex examination of a woman's seething ambivalence about her "high thinking and plain living" family and herself that closes with the anguished question, "Where is my life?" Classic examples of the art of short fiction, capturing the variety of human experience with sophisticated economy.

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Starred review from August 26, 2019
Skillfully introduced and selected by Lauren Groff, this excellent collection of 25 short stories by Hale (1908–1988) reintroduces an overlooked master of the genre. Hale explores the borderland between inner truth and outer obligation, otherness and conformity, what remains and what is lost, what humans want to be and what is actually within their power to do. In the superb “To The North,” affluent summer visitor Jack Werner feels truly at home only among the hardworking Finnish community in the New England town of Graniteside. Rejected by the Finns after he kisses one of their daughters, he gets a second chance to regain their acceptance years later. In another of the collection’s finest works, 1934’s searing “The Double House,” a despairing young boy sees his father’s happiness as his only reason to survive. In “The Bubble,” Hale deftly evokes the inner experience of pregnancy. “Those Are as Brothers” probes prejudice and empathy in its story of the divorced American wife of an abusive German refugee and an anti-Semitic German nanny in her employ. The elderly woman of “How Would You Like to Be Born...” attempts to silence the judgments of her late sister when she receives a letter appealing for donations for the defense of three black teenagers arrested for killing a white farmer. Extensively published in the New Yorker and the winner of 10 O. Henry Awards, Hale’s insightful, artfully constructed stories remain irresistible—and relevant—today.

September 15, 2019
The reclamation of undeservedly forgotten American women writers continues, following the revival of work by Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, each a short-story virtuoso who wrote with verve about women's lives. As was Nancy Hale (1908-88), who is expertly championed in this quietly thrilling selected volume by best-selling fiction writer Lauren Groff (Florida, 2018). The daughter of prominent Boston impressionist painters, Hale ended up in Virginia, and captured the undercurrents of both worlds in closely observed and tautly composed stories in which emotions rise like flood waters against the dams of family and social strictures. Written between 1934 and 1966, with many published in the New Yorker, these stinging tales of muffled suffering and witty resistance portray a Yankee new to the South who befriends a woman ostracized for her many marriages; a New Yorker who gets into an argument at a Southern supper club and is shocked to find herself among fascist sympathizers; and women patients in a sanatorium. Hale rendered each evocative setting, besieged character, and heartrending predicament with munificent insight and refined yet righteous protest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)