Lost in the City | Edward P. Jones | One of the best short story collections I've read.

Lost in the City | Edward P. Jones | brings dignity to black literature

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Lost in the City

	Lost in the City Edward P. Jones, 2004 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The nation's capital that serves as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones's prizewinning collection, Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic monuments and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that world into the lives of African American men and women who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense of hope. From "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" to the well-to-do career woman awakened in the night by a phone call that will take her on a journey back to the past, the characters in these stories forge bonds of community as they struggle against the limits of their city to stave off the loss of family, friends, memories, and, ultimately, themselves.

Critically acclaimed upon publication, Lost in the City heralds Jones as a new talent, a writer whose unaffected style is not only evocative and forceful but also filled with insight and poignancy.

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One of the best short story collections I've read.

Edward P. Jones's stories about Washington D.C. are unconventional in that some don't have endings. Often they just come to a stop. You are forced to reflect back on what you just read.

Some are better than others. "The First Day" is about an illiterate mother taking her daughter to register for kindergarten. She has to pay another woman to fill out the registration papers for her. If that one doesn't get to you, you don't have a heart.

Many of the other stories are quite long, some as many as thirty pages. My favorite was "The Store," about a boy who takes a "make work" job at a neighborhood grocery and ends up managing the place. The store becomes more important than his personal life and he loses a woman he loved because of it. "Young Lions" is about a violent young man who doesn't hesitate to shoot a clerk during a hold-up. In the end, his violent lifestyle impinges on his personal life, and he starts slapping around the woman he really loves.

Washington D.C. is definitely a character in the stories. The streets are Alphabetical and the Avenues are named after states, but this the Washington of the sixties and deterioration is only just beginning to envelope the black section of town. There are stories about how involvement in drugs debases the characters and their family members. There are stories about characters who emigrated from the South. I can't think of one that didn't touch me in some way, and that doesn't usually happen in a collection of short stories.

Edward P. Jones should be a better known author than he is.

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brings dignity to black literature

Jones is one of my all-time favorite authors.
His books resonant the feelings of loneliness
and isolation that permeate the bleak hopelessness
of urban America. His characters are flawed,
tragic, interior black modes of Shakespearean
sonnets. Reading Jones work is eating ice
cream after your tonsils have been removed.

He is destined to be revered in the same light
as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison years into
the future. He is one of the few black writers
along with Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, etc.
that I would recommend a future novel of his
without even reading it first.

Outstanding book by a master storyteller! Highly
recommended for ALL readers!

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DC Stories

Edward P. Jones writes heartbreaking but beautiful stories of the struggling poorer parts in DC--right next door but far away from the glamor of national politics. These stories are moving and they pack a punch.

Great Collection by a Gifted Writer

This collection, first published in 1992, was considered Jones's first literary effort. I find this idea of firsts interesting and would like to look at it briefly before I move on to a few of the craft elements in his stories that I would most like to steal.

This collection of short stories was published a decade before Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World." Some of the stories in the collection were first published in the 1980s in literary magazines like Ploughshares and Callaloo. One of the stories "Marie" also appeared in the Paris Review in 1992. The thing that I find interesting is that these publications do not seem to register with the general public or even reviewers. Instead, his books are presented as sudden, award winning events. Instead of a writing career spanning 25 years of craft and respectable publications, we are presented with the image of a of sudden event, a spectacular storm, a writer whose first novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

In any event, the first thing I did when I opened "Lost in the City" was to read the opening lines of each story. I wanted to see how and where he began his stories. I was thinking of an essay by Debra Spark called "Getting In and Getting Out." The essay appears in "Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life." There is an anecdote in the essay about a friend the author who is screening stories for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. She says, "If I have to read another story that begins `The alarm clock rang,' I'll shoot myself."

Although I have never started a story with this particular phrase, I do tend to begin a story at the beginning. So as I read through the Jones collection I paid particular attention to the places he began his stories.

In "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," Jones begins the narrative at some undefined future moment when the crisis of the story has already forced the characters' world to change. "Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone through the kitchen window...." The story never travels completely forward into the world from which these first lines are described. However, the story does end with a certain inevitability--a sort of narrative arc that points forward so that we understand how the characters arrive to the point we find them in the opening of the story.

"The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" covers a lot of ground in twenty-five pages. It outlines the decay of a Black, D.C. neighborhood and shows us how that decay affects the community. On one level it is a story about a father's coming to fatherhood as well as his young daughter's coming of age. It is about the place and the power of the natural world even in the urban environment. It is about an urban Black community on the edge of change.

The narrative is carried along by the story of the young girl and her pigeons. The story is usually told through a close third person narrator; however, the point of view does shift at times from the young girl, Betsy Ann Morgan, to other characters. These shifts offer insight into the community in which Betsy and her father live. But these shifts seldom last for more than a line or two and then quickly move back to Betsy.

I paid close attention to these shifts in point of view. But before I discuss them I would like to think a bit more about where these stories begin.

Another story that begins post-crisis is "The First Day." The story opens with the line: "On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and..." This is the story about a child's first day of school. The story is short, only 5 pages, but it has taken a common event, a child's first day of school, and uses it to point out the divisions between social classes in the Black community. One of the interesting things about this story is that it is told in the first person. The protagonist never reaches the crisis described in the first line within the span of the story. The narrator shows nothing but love and admiration for her mother throughout the course of the story. We are lead by that single clause, "long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother," and the trajectory of the story to understand that the protagonists shame is inevitable.

I find it fascinating that he entire story hinges on this single clause. We never see a hint of shame in the narrator aside from her opening line. If that clause were deleted we would not necessarily know that the narrator would ever come to be ashamed of her mother. But knowing this first line and following the trajectory of the story we know that the crisis and the change are inevitable.

Jones also opens his stories from the middle. The narrator then takes the story back to that middle before moving farther forward. He does this in the story "A New Man."

"A New Man" begins with the lines, "One day in late October, Woodrow L. Cunningham came home early with his bad heart and found his daughter with two boys." The narrative eventually makes its way back to explain exactly how Woodrow came to find his daughter with two boys, but it does not stop there. The narrative continues. It carries the story farther. We come to understand exactly what this event means in the life of Woodrow and how it comes to define his essential character.

Now, rather than continue with this idea of how or where Jones begins his stories, I would like to move on to two other divices Jones uses: point of view, and the idea of epiphany and change within a character.

As I mentioned earlier, Jones does not shy away from changing the narrative point of view if it serves the story. But the places where he shifts point of view seem to be dependent on a few things. He only ever shifts in a third person narrative. The point of view never shifts for more than three or four sentences. The point of view only shifts in stories that are 20 pages in length or longer. He always quickly brings the point of view back to its original place.

It is the brevity in the shift that I find most interesting. It is like one of those little flashes of insight that Woolf wrote about--matches struck unexpectedly in the dark--or the mirror in Joyce's "The Dead." The shift lets us see for a moment how the character looks within their world. For example the title story of the collection, "Lost in the City," is told by a close third person narrator. However, there are two moments in the story where the focus shifts from the protagonist, Lydia Walsh, to her taxi driver. The first shift occurs about two thirds through the story: "He thought that maybe she had been born elsewhere, that she did not know Washington, would not know the streets beyond what the white people called the federal enclave." This shift in point of view ends quickly. The narrator brings our focus back to Lydia. "But in fact, the farther north he went, the more she knew about where they were going."

At the end of "Lost in the City," the point of view again shifts for a moment. "The cab driver thought that her crying meant that maybe it had finally hit her that her mother had died and that soon his passenger would be coming to herself."

I suspect that it is the brevity of these shifts that make them work. Another aspect of these shifts is the fact that they are subtly revealing--not deeply or overtly revealing--and they are always revealing something in the protagonist. These shifts in point of view seem to stress the importance of community in these stories. They show, however briefly, that these characters do not live in isolation, that on some level they are always aware of themselves within the context of others--or perhaps it is that we should always be aware of them within the context of a greater community.

The final aspect of this collection of stories that I would like to look at relates to an issue raised in an essay by Jim Shepard titled, "I Know Myself Real Well. That's the Problem." In this essay, Shepard criticizes the tendency for novice fiction to create characters who are "whooshing along the conveyor belts" of narrative toward some kind of epiphany. Given that my stories have this tendency, I am curious how Jones creates a sense of movement and revelation without allowing his characters to fall into that whooshing conveyor belt.

One way that Jones avoids this narrative conveyor belt is by beginning the story someplace other than the beginning and ending the story in a place that points to the inevitability of change or crisis, but he does not necessarily show us that change or crisis. This can also be seen in the story, "The First Day." We do not experience the moment when the narrator becomes ashamed of her mother. We are told in the opening line that the narrator will indeed one day be ashamed of her mother. We are lift at the end of the story with the inevitability that, despite the strength and character of the mother, the child will one day become as ashamed of her as other members of the community.

Often in this collection of stories the narrator is not even aware of his or her change. The reader senses that something is in fact permanently altered, but it is difficult to say exactly what that thing is. At the close of the story "My Mother's House," we do not find the protagonist, a mother whose biological son has just murdered by her godson over a dispute involving drugs and money, in the throws of some sort of epiphany.

Her husband, who is not the father of either child, works as a bodyguard for her biological son. Her husband skulks away from the scene of the crime, leaving her in the street to comfort her dieing godson. She has always known that her husband was a weak man. At the close of this story we find the protagonist drinking a fifth of vodka and walking from room to room in the house her drug-dealing son purchased for her. She unlocks all the doors and windows, "for Santiago (her son) had no key to her house. And outside that house there was a very cruel would and she did not like to think that her child was out there without a place to come to."

The protagonist knows throughout the story that the world is indeed cruel. The cruelty is not a revelation. Nor does she necessarily seem poised to make some sort of change. In fact, she opens her house in a rough neighborhood so that her son, who has just murdered her godson and pointed a gun at her face, may come into the house for comfort.

Perhaps the real change at the end of this story takes place in the reader. After we have experienced this world, we can never view these characters or their world in the same light--we will never be able to read this story in the same way again.

In the end, there are still many more aspects of this collection that will occupy me throughout the coming months. I have marked my copy of the book with many notes. I find myself referring back to them often.

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Edward P. Jones is a gift of love and power to the world!

An artist whose prose and narrative arcs generate irresistible pull and evoke in readers a genuine sense of entire worlds, Edward P. Jones has written two books. The first, Lost in the City, garnered the PEN/Hemingway award. The second, The Known World, won the Pulitzer Prize. African American, a luminary of American letters, Jones affirms that which is humble and human, and does so with startling power. In the words of MLK he has a "heart full of grace, a soul generated by love."

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