THE INVISIBLE ENEMY
Alcoholism and the Modern Short Story
Edited by Miriam Dow and Jennifer Regan
St. Paul: Greywolf Press, 1989
241 pp., $9.50
Despite of its textbook title and subtitle and its official ISBN listing under "Literature/Chemical Dependency," this handsome book is, in fact, and anthology of short fiction, part of the worthy Graywolf Short Fiction series. It consists of fifteen American short stories by a variety of writers. The earliest is Frank O'Connor's "Christmas Morning," first published in1946; the most recent Robert Stone's "Helping," which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1987. The collection is dedicated to the late Raymond Carver, whose well-known story "Where I'm Calling From" (1983) is included; and the striking painting used as the cover image is identified as Poema de Omar, by Oscar Rodriguez, from the collection of Carver's window - poet and story writer Tess Gallagher.
The two editors identify themselves in the biographical notes as recovering alcoholics. In addition to selecting the stories for The Invisible Enemy and arranging them in five sections - "The Family and Alcoholism," "Children," "Progression," "Delusions," and "Trying to Stop" - the editors offer a brief introduction making a case for the possible social value of their anthology as part of a larger movement against the conventional "tolerance of alcohol abuse." They argue that the book has a special value:
“Although the abundance of information now available can educate the intellect, it may not reach a deeper level of emotional understanding. Much of the literature of the ‘field’ seems didactic and programmatic. The Invisible Enemy presents stories, which, through the artist's vision, probe alcohol's profound emotional effects.”
They briefly describe some of the lessons of the stories - the involvement of the family in the problem of alcoholism, the special troubles of children "in a world pervaded by fear and mistrust," and an accounting of the ways and means of the individual alcoholic, especially those “repeated strategies to justify and hide dependence on alcohol [that] end in isolation and loss of control."
Minor questions
No question that the editorial idea is a laudable one, but there are some minor questions that arise from the scheme. Some of these are extraliterary, and some are not.
Alcoholism is a worldwide problem. It always has been a powerful dependency that claims its victims without regard to race, creed, color, national origin, or sexual preference. Except in those countries where alcohol use is prohibited as a matter of religion and the prohibition is strictly enforced, there are drunks everywhere in the world today, especially (and not surprisingly) in the poverty-stricken, less-developed nations. Limiting the anthology to American stories represents something of a distortion. There is almost an implication that the problem is in some way peculiarly American, yet another example of the failure of our system and way of
...
Read Full Article
|
