I’ve been reading “The Stories of J.F. Powers” on the recommendation of Charles Baxter, who mentioned Powers in his excellent collection of essays on writing, “The Art of Subtext.” Baxter situates Powers as an alternative to Flannery O’Connor, saying that he hates O’Connor because her imagination is “nourished by cruelty,” she uses her characters for didactic purposes, and she knows nothing about human love.
I disagree with Baxter, mainly because I feel like he’s looking for the wrong things in Flannery — you don’t go to Melville’s Moby Dick looking for precise plotting and concision, and you don’t go to Cormac McCarthy looking for strong female characters. O’Connor provides loads of pleasures that Baxter apparently has overlooked — wit, surprise, and plenty about desire (although not the type of romantic love Baxter was looking for).
But overall Baxter is right to recommend J.F. Powers. About the only thing Powers has in common with O’Connor is dealing canada pharmacy online with Catholic characters.
What I wanted to highlight in this post is the way Powers animates his fictional universe. Through personification and anthropomorphizing, he makes his inanimate fictional settings spring to life. Let me give you a number of examples from the first story in his collected stories, “The Lord’s Day”:
- “The trees had the bad luck to be born Mulberry.”
- “Waves of heat wandered thirstily.”
- “A few twigs folded in death.”
- “The dining room was still groggy from Sunday dinner.”
- “Father’s radio woke up with a roar.”
- “He wrinkled the mottled scalp between his hands and it seemed to make a nasty face at her.”
I never personify inanimate objects in my fiction. I’m not sure why I treat the technique as verboten — I think I just worry that it won’t come off right. Certainly it’s a technique which has fallen out of favor the last few decades. But Powers uses it so seductively I might end up toying with it for a story.
