Doerr, Anthony. The Shell Collector.
New York: Scribner, 2002
A high
school student once asked me, “So when is a story a ‘short story’
and when is it a ‘novel?’” I explained that it didn’t have to
be either, that there were stories called ‘novelettes’ that fell
somewhere in between and that lengths were arbitrary. I added that a
‘short story’ is a story that is short. No good. We finally
agreed that a short story was one written to be read at one sitting
and compared it to a movie which we watch all-at-once versus a series
(like Downton Abbey) that we come back to a number of times. That
seemed to satisfy students, but not me necessarily.
Anthony
Doerr’s ‘short stories’ range from ten to thirty-five or so
pages so at a modest reading speed of 300 words-per-minute, the
shortest would take about twelve minutes to read; the longest about
forty minutes. For slower readers—say 200 wpm, the range would be
about eighteen minutes to around seventy.
So
‘short story’ fits.
Anthony
Doerr’s books have fetched general acclaim and prestigious awards
including the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light we
Cannot See. I actually haven’t
read any of his novels—yet—but About Grace
is on the coffee table here at my daughter’s home in Panama, and
will be my next read. Other novels by Doerr include Four
Seasons in Rome and Memory
Wall.
Reviewing
a short story collection can become something akin to reviewing eight
novels: what seems true about “The Shell Collector” needn’t be
true about “July Fourth.” My choice is to talk a bit about one
of Doerr’s stories, namely the last in the collection, “Mkondo.”
The plot follows a man by the name of
Ward Beach who has been sent by a museum to Tanzania to collect a
fossil of a rare, prehistoric bird-dinosaur. During his sojourn
there, he meets Naima in the most bizarre of encounters; she’s
running down the middle of a road so that he’s unable to pass her
with his Land Rover. She finally stops, jumps onto the hood of his
vehicle and says, “Keep driving, I want to feel the wind!”
Her wild energy captivates him and he
begins to “court” her, driving over rough roads to the hut where
she lives with her parents. But courting her isn’t easy; every time
he visits, she challenges him to catch her and she takes off through
paths in the forest with him in pursuit. She always outruns him;
she’s too fast and there are too many trails criss-crossing. He
goes on a fitness regime to the point where he can almost keep up
with her until one day she leads him to the edge of a cliff where her
footprints cease. Beach falls over the cliff and finds himself in a
deep pool at the bottom where Naima awaits him. He asks her to marry
him and she consents. It’s as if she wouldn’t have him until he
proved himself able to take “the final step.”
But this is only background. This
beautiful, wild creature doesn’t fare well in Ohio. Like a plant in
a drought, she wilts from grief at the loss of the Africa she feels
she’s left forever, the loss accentuated by the tamed grayness of
Ohio. Finally, her despondency is so intense that Beach no longer
tries to reach her, she no longer invites him to reach out to her.
Until she discovers photography, that
is, a medium through which she reacquaints herself with clouds and
skies, light and shadows to the point where she is obsessed with the
possibility of reclaiming a world she’s left behind. Mastering the
intricacies and excelling in the art she’s discovered gives Naima
the courage she needs and she takes herself back to Tanzania and the
house in which she grew up.
The story doesn’t end there, but as
is typical of other stories in the collection, Doerr avoids the
gratuitous supplying of meanings and outcomes, causes and effects, a
skill that separates the seasoned storyteller from the amateur.
Doerr’s diction is highly accessible
and evocative.
“The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she
clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle
of vines below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting
frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was
nearly hyperventilating (185-6).”
“Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d
sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with
them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera,
tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous
sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland (212).”
What is true of
virtually all the stories in The Shell Collector
is the uniqueness of the characters. Griselda is a gangly, six foot
something high school volleyball player who marries a metal eater (he
swallows razor blades, armours and is purported to have eaten—piece
by piece—a Ford Ranger) as a touring show. And there’s Joseph
Saleeby, an escapee from the brutal civil war in Liberia who takes a
job as a caretaker of a millionaire’s summer home . . . and forgets
to take care of it. The title story “The Shell Collector” is
centered on a blind collector of shells—a former professor in his
field—along the beaches and shallows of a marine park in the Lamu
Archipelago in Kenya. The development of believable
characters—especially the eccentric kind—is difficult without
losing verisimilitude. Doerr amazes with his ability to create
characters that live, and
with an economy of brush strokes: a rare thing.
I’ve
always been partial to short stories. I find most novels too long and
you don’t come across many published novelettes anymore. As Anthony
Doerr has demonstrated here, the short story genre is able to deliver
all we expect when we eagerly pick up a book.
