Our Former Lives in Art

April 16, 2007
Strange events haunt the lives of the intrepid Southern characters in the second collection (after Her Kind of Want
) from Alabama native Davis. The title story concerns the parents of a fragile, gifted child obsessed with drawing antiquated war scenes and mayhem perhaps gleaned from a past life—a child so unlike the football-throwing boy the father had hoped for that he secretly ponders doing away with the boy. The troubled teen protagonist of "Lily, Love" is matched with a lonely elderly man sick with emphysema in a community outreach program, and the two find their senses of alienation nicely compatible. "Giving Up the Ghost," tracks the emotional ramifications of witnessing a car accident on a young couple still reeling from the miscarriage of their baby. Frank, the husband, held the hand of the dying accident victim, an intimacy he is hesitant to share with his wife. "Pilgrimage in Georgia" is a terrific writerly sendup about a novelist who moves to a small Southern town in order to gain the authenticity he lacks, only to be tormented by the productivity of a young writer as much a hack as he is. Davis creates magnificently conflicted characters with low-key stylistic panache.

Starred review from April 1, 2007
These nine heartfelt stories are set within the livesyes, lives do indeed function as settings hereof ordinary people in the Deep South, a location that serves as the larger context in which the characters live and breathe. In sharing her ironic, sometimes sarcastic, but always deeply human vision of the quirks of human behavior, Davis shares with other southern female short-story writers, such as Flannery OConnor and Eudora Welty, a sense of relish of the absurdity running through the human condition. "Detritus" perfectly showcases Davis take on life. She dexterously assumes the voice of a teenage boy narrating a time when, just after his father left the family for good, his mother got religion and saved the life and soul of a brain-damaged girl left in her care. "Pilgrimage in Georgia," more serious but no less cut-to-the-quick in capturing human frailty, is a beautiful articulation of the theme of accepting life as just an arrangement of ordinary things, not all things in life being "art" and thus rarefied and elusive. And "Giving Up the Ghost" is even more serious, about an accident that becomes a catalyst for reconciling the male protagonists sense of self and what he wants in life and marriage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)