AMONG THE DANGS (255 pp.)—George P. Elliott—Holt, Rinehart & Winston ($3.95).
People who like to read themselves to sleep with a short story or two had better stay away from this collection. Author Elliott does not write to soothe. His intention is to disturb, and if residual disturbance in the reader’s mind is the mark of a good storyteller, then he must be one of the best now at work in English.
Author Elliott, 42, who teaches English at the University of Iowa, has published his stories chiefly in “little” magazines; he is as far from the frequently narcotic tone of The New Yorker as he is from the wooden respectability of the Saturday Evening Post. The ten tales in this book have the virtue of providing continuous surprise. To have read one is not to have read them all; only two, both fantasies, seem to have been brewed in the same kettle. The longest story, A Family Matter, has everything needed to make a full-length novel, but in its 44 pages it tells a good deal more than most novels about family life. A snappish, unblinkered realist comes to visit his three sons, all married and none of them fond of the old man. His avowed purpose is to make up his mind with which one of them he will live. From this homely, commonplace situation, Elliott contrives a remarkably interesting series of confrontations that range from the serious to the sadly absurd.
In Miss Cudahy of Stowes Landing, there is an eccentric, selfish old woman who sees her deaf-mute daughter on the point of finding happiness and refuses to let it come about. But motives and actions are never simple in an Elliott story. Each of the three, girl, man and old lady, could resolve the business in a moment. What stops them from taking the decisive step is a flaw in character, the underlying subject of the story.
Even when they are shockingly unpleasant, these yarns make compulsive reading. For whether he is dealing with the half-comic, half-sad dodges and devices of the old (Love among the Old Folk) or the grisly solution of the Negro problem in a U.S. gone totalitarian (The NRACP), Elliott goes straight to the heart of each matter, in language as clear and uncompromising as his own insight.
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