Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist (2014)

'Types of Americans' is one way I want to approach this. When you're on the tube in London, people from elsewhere can stand out. Most Australians, for example, unless they're longtime resident, are like sore thumbs. Americans, too, but that's a slightly more complex story. I divide them into AIMs and AAMs. AIMs are Americans of International Mores and AAMs are Americans of American Mores. AIMs are often quite indistinguishable from locals and have a sense about them of slotting right in. AAMs are a different story altogether, though they are not some sort of clunky cliche of Americanness. They have a wealthy gloss about them, and combine it with a kind of knowing and intelligent wryness which demands respect. But AAMs are also somehow preoccupied with their 'smart' and 'well-heeled' lives, whereas AIMs are happy to be rougher round the edges. Anyway, almost all of Ellen Gilchrist's characters in these stories are AAMs. I've read volumes of hers in the past and realise now that these people, perhaps except where she's gone historical, are her central preoccupation. There's one story here which is the epitome of it, called Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where a group of women going on holiday to Italy are caught up in a terrorist emergency at Heathrow. Each of them is a notable in some way, and perhaps calls the governor of their state or mayor of their city by his first name, for example; somehow they look out at the world through wryly privilege-acknowledged but not quite ground-level aware eyes. Their doctor friends are not just GPs, but more likely are authoring a key text, or taking up a lucrative professorship, maybe. They are intelligent enough to be aware of their privilege, but not enough to do any serious sheep-from-goat-separating on the basis of it. They're just a little over-comfortable. And this is of course combined with their Southernness in this Gilchristian context, which has a tang to it. The other thing that strikes me from this reading of Gilchrist after such a long break is that she suffers from Oates' Disease. The major criticism I think which can be made of Joyce Carol Oates comes in the lack of differentiation in the voices of her characters. Other than that, much of her work is supremely powerful. This volume has made it obvious that Gilchrist has the same problem. Too many of these characters sound like one another in conversation. And she adds a further subtlety to the problem - even the rhythms are often the same. The conversations in Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (again it's the perfect example) are strange things indeed, with staccato recountings of life history in ways which feel removed enough from real speech to cause the reader to confirm their disbelief rather than suspend it. Now, with all those cavillings expressed, what I must emphasize is the fact that Gilchrist is, even so, an incredibly limpid storyteller, who manages, through some sort of magic, to make the ordinary details of these people's lives fascinating. One can drop into these pages, and feel surrounded by an atmosphere, sometimes of direct engagement with the scary parts of life and death, sometimes with warm Southern penumbra which soothe.