Jul 22, 2009
Review: Forgetting English by Midge Raymond
By: MattBriggs Categories: Books Review
{ Midge Raymond reads 7/23 at Hugo House }
[ Forgetting English | Midge
Raymond | Eastern Washington University Press | $16.95 Paperback ] Midge Raymond’s first book, Forgetting English, won the 2007 Spokane Fiction Prize. It is a collection of eight stories about women who are often out of work and on vacation or enforced travel and escape to the African Savannah, Tonga, Hawaii, or Antarctica. Many of the characters and narrators held upper middle management jobs and are used to living lives privileged with large incomes, expense accounts, and corporate rank, but they were also confined in their function working for multinational companies. Out of work, they are at a loss. The business world flattens these characters’ lives and permeates their homes. When one of these character’s homes is portrayed, for instance in the story “Beyond the Kopjes”, it is a flat description like a real estate ad: “they were living in a brownstone then, a charming walk-up that a month later they would trade for a full security building with a doorman.” Many of the hotel rooms, resort lodgings, and student apartments are described with more detail. Only the house of a woman (who is not a narrator in the story) is described in a way that might be termed homey. This woman’s house is in the first story (where a recently fired executive visits her sister in Tonga), but, it is a “squat green house, with a leaky roof and an outhouse.”
A vast distance lies between these narrators and their husbands. Another story follows an executive around the globe as she performs the work of laying off employees. The most emblematic story is the excellent tale, “The Road to Hana,” which hinges on a suggested mystery and division between Ethan and Sue, the couple in the story. Ethan has had an affair. Sue has an heirloom ring with a mysterious history. Ethan believes the ring is evidence of Sue’s infidelity and the ring entitles him to leave the marriage on higher moral ground. That such a logic is possible speaks to the underlying melancholy in the story. They are on vacation and not yet divorced, but will be. Sue reveals the history of a ring that has nothing to do with infidelity, but will not tell Ethan because he won’t believe her. He has no reason to believe her. The ring is lost. In the story:
“The two woman’s eyes lock. So this is it, Sue thinks, this is the new fate of Brooke’s ring. As Ethan makes the turn and as Jeff and Lori continue on their way, Sue watches the ring disappear, passing again from one woman to another, from one generation to the next, cementing a legacy of longing.”
This longing is a mystery — it is a longing for an absence that is never really articulated in these stories. This seems like a good strategy. To articulate the object of longing destroys it. The object becomes a goal. Instead, the object of longing is implied in the lives of characters at the peripheries of these stories. For instance, there is Cheryl, the sister of the executive in the first story. On Tonga Cheryl has built a life connected to a community. There is the couple that swim in the pool on the “The Road To Hana” who are just married and have to become middle level executives in the limbo of airports and meeting rooms.
[...] Raymond reads from her excellent collection of eight stories, Forgetting English, about women in various forms of disconnected turmoil. In one story, a researcher in Antarctica [...]