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An Introduction
to the Stories of Michael Lee
By James Carroll
The town of Albright, Massachusetts takes its character
from where it is—on the margins—and from
what it was—a place built around a working mill.
Now the mill is gone, and the world elsewhere has moved
on. The people of Albright carry the weight of the past,
with little sense of future. Paradise, to them, is the
movie theater downtown, and it won’t be long before
the highway Cineplex does to it what time has done to
the town.
The subjects of these unfailingly poignant stories
are the people of Albright—waitresses, mechanics,
small business owners, teachers, the mayor’s son,
vets, honky-tonk musicians, a little leaguer, guys with
a great idea for a miniature golf course, town workers,
the mayor’s wife. A writing workshop, several
bars, the shadows of Vietnam, the junkyard of wrecked
marriages, Albright Hospital, the Albright Memorial
Cemetery, the school, a weedy industrial park, and always,
endlessly, the road—these are the places in which
the stories unfold. Each one is entirely particular,
rendering the experience of one or two people whom we
have never met before, yet they are familiar. We know
these people well, yet Lee has written them unlike any
other writer. And what their places add up to—no
paradise—is nothing less than the earth itself,
which is more than enough. The geography of disappointment,
too, can be a wonder.
Michael Lee’s writing is inventive, strong, luminous,
but his achievement in these stories goes beyond the
rare clarity of voice and style that is their mark.
His achievement is to have taken the mundane experience
of ordinary human beings with absolute seriousness,
and in doing so he lays bare—no, celebrates—the
dignity and value that adhere in every life. In Lee’s
hands, the facts of failure, even of offense, open into
the possibility of acceptance. This is so even for those
characters who are trapped in time, the desperadoes
and losers and brawlers who, because of the compassion
with which Lee writes of them, seem not so different
from the reader, safe in a chair. Because of Lee, in
fact, the reader, for a while, becomes trapped in time,
too—a confrontation through fiction with the hard
truth of life, that, as they might say in Albright,
so aren’t we all?
What is eternity, Lee asks, but standing under a fly
ball, driving to Taos, waiting for the ambulance, thinking
of what to engrave on a tombstone, keeping a secret
when there is none, regretting a marriage, asking for
a date, hoping for the Red Sox? And what is the ordinary
world when observed with feeling, wisdom, generosity,
and, yes, love—if not paradise after all? Such
is the precious, brave work of Michael Lee in this book.
These stores open into eternity like that, and they
faithfully render the earth—this one, ours—as
the garden we wrongly think we lost.
James Carroll is the author of nine novels, the National
Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem: God,
My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, and most
recently Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the
Jews—A History. His op-ed column appears weekly
in the the Boston Globe. He lives in Boston with his
family.
Back to:
Paradise Dance
PUB DATE: August, 2002
CATEGORY: Fiction / Short Stories
PAGES: 200
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-6-9
PRICE: $14.95/ Paperback Original
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