“Neighbors” opens the door to a literary career cut short NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STORIES
Ploughshares … Granta … Mademoiselle?
Yes, children, before it stopped publishing fiction in 1992, this sadly defunct glossy magazine was, between the lipstick ads, a deep and shimmering American literary oasis.
Mlle, pronounced Millie around the office like the dependable farm girl she was, showcased the short stories of James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Barbara Kingsolver and a ballroom’s worth of other award-winning writers. It ran a summer guest editor program for college students whose alumni included Joan Didion, Ann Beattie and most famously — because of the novel “The Bell Jar,” with its memorable scene of ptomaine poisoning after a luncheon of avocado stuffed with crabmeat — Sylvia Plath.
Also Diane Oliver, whose death, at 22 after a motorcycle accident, was even more premature than Plath’s. She will be eternally mademoiselle.
Born in 1943 to schoolteachers in Charlotte, N.C., Oliver, who was Black, attended segregated schools, university in Greensboro and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lived to see four of her stories published, including in The Sewanee Review and Negro Digest. A new collection, “Neighbors and Other Stories,” gathers these with 10 more and an introduction by Tayari Jones, the author of “An American Marriage.”
At a moment when short stories seem less regular launchpads for long careers than occasional meteors, reading these is like finding hunks of gold bullion buried in your backyard.
Oliver’s primary topic — she didn’t have enough time on this earth to develop many — was the private bulwark of the family, during a time when Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws still ruled the South.
In the title story, which was posthumously awarded the O. Henry Prize in 1967, a mother, father and sister agonize over a young boy who, if they can stomach subjecting him to the experience, will be singlehandedly integrating his elementary school in the morning. Police cruisers haunt their house. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” a student named Winifred realizes she is “tired of being the Experiment” as she settles uneasily into a white college, deciding to major in history because drama would mean playing “the maid’s part for four years,” and biology might require field trips and “testing” how motels will receive her. Sublimating the stress and ringed by mean-girl white roommates, she begins hiding desserts — and then herself.
Food turns up frequently in Oliver’s work: nothing as fancy as the Plathian avocados, which have been romanticized and recreated by multiple food blogs and at least one Twitter “feed,” but as totems of scarcity. I don’t think Bon Appetit will be publishing a recipe for “mice and rice soup,” from a story called “When the Apples are Ripe,” about brothers, an elderly friend and a pocket watch, anytime soon.
In “Traffic Jam” a mother of five, her husband’s whereabouts uncertain, leaves her baby and diapers in a laundry basket on an acquaintance’s porch so she can go work as a maid, and pilfers four slices of ham from her white employer’s fridge. The same mother appears in another story, hoping for peach trees to feed the children on the long walk home from a frustrating doctor’s visit. And when a young woman named Jenny joins a sit-in at a department store tearoom (“Before Twilight”), she observes how “all of the lights were soft pink and cast a hazy glow on the tablecloth,” and thinks “even brussels sprouts would taste good in a place like this.”
Such luminous simplicity is deceptive; these stories detail basic routines of getting through difficult days, but then often deliver a massive wallop. That might just be a variant on the phrase “you people,” the cold shock of casual, legitimized racism spoken out loud or as internal monologue. “Not that she was conscious of color, but light-skinned children looked brighter at spring parties,” one character thinks.”the more they smelled,” another has observed, “the earlier they came to school.”
“Mint Juleps Not Served Here,” wherein a patronizing social worker visits a reclusive Black family in the woods to check on their son Rabbit, who’s gone mute after being bullied, has a hilarious horror-movie twist. (In The Bitter Southerner, the writer Michael A. Gonzales compared Oliver to both Jordan Peele and Shirley Jackson, and I agree.) The succinct “No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk,” which the Paris Review ran last year, is a clever folding screen of fantasy, nightmare and tiring reality.
“Neighbors and Other Stories” is not wholly polished; how could it be? The experimental “Frozen Voices” whorls around and around confusingly, repetitively — something about an affair? A plane crash? “I never said goodbye,” the narrator intones again and again.
Jet magazine was one of the few periodicals to say goodbye to Diane Oliver with an obituary. Thanks to this collection, The New York Times now belatedly bids a full-throated hello.