The Humanity and Humor of “Origin Stories” https://ift.tt/sa5i7Vy
At a lecture she gave recently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the world-renowned curator Ronni Baers juxtaposed images of two self-portraits: one by Gerrit Dou and one by Rembrandt. In the former, the artist sits within a grand imaginary niche, elegantly clutching the tools of his trade. A rich woven carpet hangs to each side as if he is on stage, and a globe and other objects of learning are placed in the background to emphasize Dou’s status. In the latter work, Rembrandt, his worn and middle-aged face illuminated under a simple artist’s cap, sits in front of, well, nothing. Somehow, his wrinkles, his gaze, and that cap tell the whole story.
Dou and Rembrandt were painting, in part, about the painting life. Corinna Vallianatos, the Virginia-based writer of Origin Stories, is similarly self-referential. She writes, in part, about the writing life — specifically about a woman writing about a woman writer who is also a wife, lover, mother, and friend. But she is more like Rembrandt than Dou, concerned more with being human than with status, and more interested in the effect the passage of time has on us.
Many of Vallianatos’ stories are set in Virginia. You know this because of the fat columns, the serpentine garden walls, the dogwoods, and the “tourists gawking through the glass door at Poe’s old rickety bed, pressing the button to hear the informative Poe script read with fixed jollity over and over again.” California figures here, too. Vallianatos, like her primary characters, has lived and taught and written in both states.
Vallianatos’ first short story collection, My Escapee, won the 2011 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and her work appears in The Best American Short Stories 2023. She crafts wise prose that is intimate and conversational. At times, it is evocative of the work of author Sigrid Nunez, another writer who writes about writing. But Vallianatos has a sense of humor. She selects her words with care, and allows her characters to reflect, to question how others see them and how they see themselves.
The stories, notably the eponymous “Origin Story,” are often composed of fragments. One of the strongest works in the collection, it showcases her gifts: the deep attention she pays to the sensuality and potential meaning of objects; the ease with which she writes dialogue; and her wisdom, bits of which appear like sudden shafts of sunlight — coming and going in an instant, revealing hidden truths.
“Origin Story” is divided by the places the narrator has lived, and each begins with a house: “a plum-shingled cottage,” “a white stucco box.” These houses contain memories that tell the story of a woman — and a marriage. In Ohio, when a grandmother dies, the couple move, rent-free, into her home, and there the narrator finds
“a grapefruit still in a bowl on the dining room table. She watched as it grew smaller and smaller and its pink blush dimmed, as it turned from an object of the ordinary world into a symbol, and she realized this was how religion worked, to eternalize not humans but the things they had touched, the places they had been, to make sure there was reverence and permanence in a world so porous you might fall through its cracks at any moment. Eventually, she tossed the grapefruit into the trash. They got married…”
Another story, “Dogwood,” is fractured even further, the memories defying organization. Stitched together, these patches turn into meditations on the fleeting, and occasionally gilded, nature of life. The narrator references another writer, Joe Brainard, who in turn serves as her muse. These collected memories, together, bear great emotional weight, because the narrator is carrying a death from her childhood inside of her. This death, it is revealed, touches everything. She introspects: “Death is the search party that searches for you all your life. You hear it off in the distance, calling gently at first and then with less sympathy, less patience, with an urgency that seems gratuitous.”
The wry humor in Origin Stories is essential. In “Something in Common” a Virginia mother visits her grown daughter in California and casts a maternal eye over her new place: “Her coffeemaker’s an expensive, imported model that I can’t comment on because she would take whatever I said as a criticism even if I didn’t mean it that way. (I would mean it that way.)” In “A Neighboring State” a mother and her daughter stand in separate rooms and gaze at themselves in different mirrors: “It was passed down, the act of scrutiny. They both knew it.” And in “The Artist’s Wife” a protagonist’s boss explains the writing process: “Throw some longing in the pot! Stir it up with an absent father and a moldering trunk of old letters! My god, writers act like it’s so hard.”
Be forewarned, you should skip this collection if you require tidy endings. Vallianatos prefers to leave us with an image, an aside, some kind of puzzle. You have to work it through if you want to cling to meaning. Or you can just lie on your back and let it carry you, floating along on her carefully assembled words.
“New Girls” is told from the collective perspective of a support group, girls in college who are trying to survive the ravages of childhood with the guidance of a counselor who makes a terrible, careless mistake. One, struggling with bulimia, who emerges as a main character, thinks, “Maybe this is why she wanted to be a writer, so she might turn every humiliating moment into something larger, stronger, more lasting.” It would appear that Vallianatos has done just that in this moving collection of stories.
Origin Stories
By Corinna Vallianatos
Graywolf Press
Published February 4, 2025
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