The Legacy of Breece D'J Pancake
When is a book review not exactly a book review?
Revisiting an important collection of fiction.
Critically lauded but relatively unknown in his time, Breece D'J Pancake's legacy starts and ends with the The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. Released in 1983, four years after his apparent suicide, the slim collection gathers all ten of his completed works, a stark and solitary statement immediately praised by critics and his contemporaries. In tight but textured language, Pancake opens and closes a door into both his life and the lives of the place that produced him.
Roy Coughlin revisits the collection here for Nailed, but all attempts to parse the brief glimpse through that door and to deliver a conventional review fail. What is left is the outline of a deep impression, and Pancake's own taut language.
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In the hills of West Virginia, men and women circle in the dust, born lonely and caged. Cross the open fields, leave the mine, move to Chicago: there is no moment after, though years might pass.
“When ya leavin?”
“Pretty soon,” she said, pulling him closer.
The language is familiar and alien, regional-stories but not stranger-stories—the recognizable forms of people trapped in a moment that precedes change.
What turned them all will spin them forever.
Imminence taunts: Pregnant of a husband not the brother she loves; selling the weight of father's farm and memory, hopping a train anywhere; on his knees, broken jaw, torn tongue, rising to blind fight. The nearest future a faintly outlined promise.
Reva stared at two moons, one hanging quietly above Ohio, the other broken by the slow current of the river.
Spirals tighten: Chasing the phantoms of friend and pride and unanswerable questions of fidelity and family; driving endless miles of highway, forever into and out of the wreck that crippled his brother and his life; knowing now that he is “a murderer, that the gun he always carried had worked.” The space between them and change infinitely divisible.
After comes the long wait—not a day or night, but both folding on each other until it is all just a time, a wait.
The author is dead, shot himself. Nobody seems to call it suicide, which seems a cruel echo of his stories: impossible hope for something other. This small collection of words is all that he left, poised and pre-momentous, the same closed loop of his life, the same closed loop of the lives that he told. Potential and impotence. Dawn rising fresh over dead coal dust.
I stop in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it.
Returning to these stories traces a place I have always been. Fields creep close to the dirt roads that mile-measure their acres. Lines that thin but do not fade. I root for the actors written here, I want for them anything at all. But going in I already know their precarious momentum, and coming out I am reminded of my own spent changes small and large, and all the words of my home that seem strange now but each meant something forever knowable.
He got up and opened the screen, and let the black fly buzz out into the rain. When he saw the deep holes the drops were making, he wondered if the fly would make it.
“Why don't winter-flies eat?” he asked Trudy.
“I figger they do,” she said from the stove.
“Never do,” he said, going to the sink to wash.
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All italicized quotations above were taken from The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, by Breece D'J Pancake (Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown).