The Drowned Life
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Strange tales, real vision
REVIEW BY JEDIDIAH BERRY Earlier this year, Jeffrey Ford's haunting novel The Shadow Year was published to considerable acclaim. Now just months later we have The Drowned Life, a collection of 16 of Ford's recent short stories. This is lucky news for readers, because Jeffrey Ford is one of the best story writers working today. His short fiction is at turns creepy, funny, familiar and strange; it leaves the reader with a sense of having been drawn slowly into a world—or a frame of mind—in which metaphor and reality merge to powerful effect. Among the more memorable of the stories is "The Night Whiskey," narrated by a boy entrusted to carry out his rural town's bizarre tradition, the Drunk Harvest. A group of villagers, chosen once per year by lottery, are served the rare spirit of the title and sent into a somnambulistic trance, allowing them to communicate with dead loved ones before winding up asleep in the limbs of trees (thus the need for the "Harvest"). What begins as a humorous and fanciful tale takes a disturbing turn, and it's here that Ford displays his mastery of the form. Having first been charmed by the story's quaintness, we find ourselves confronted with the dangerous allure of tradition and the ruinous effects of small-town secrets. Other stories feature a hidden society of those who remember their time in the womb and communicate by way of a mystical scribble ("The Scribble Mind"), a peculiar wind that causes absurdist transformations ("The Dreaming Wind"), and a father and son who uproot a dead oak tree and discover a journal hidden among its roots (the apparently autobiographical "Present from the Past"). Then there's the title story, in which a man named Hatch winds up in the fantastical city of "Drowned Town," where decomposing deadbeats wander in the shadow of a mechanical shark named Financial Ruin, but the television at the bar is still broadcasting "News from the War." There's a carnival show featuring a prophetic octopus, and a man in a diving suit searching for his lost wife, but what remains with us is the poignancy of Hatch's failure and his desire to return to his family in the world above. Despite their inherent strangeness, Ford's stories are deeply humane, grounded in the details of everyday life and struggle. Jedidiah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, forthcoming from Penguin in February 2009. He is an assistant editor of Small Beer Press.
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