A teacher, scholar, and former Poet Laureate of Virginia, Kelly Cherry has published some thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, as well as a couple of classical translations. With this latest story collection, Cherry completes a trilogy which began with My Life & Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1990), and continued with The Society of Friends: Stories (University of Missouri Press, 1999). I find it interesting that Cherry chose the short story form for writing a trilogy, since it is no secret that story collections are often a hard sell in the book trade. But I have read all three books now and it became quickly obvious that Cherry is a master of the form. And here’s where it gets interesting. Any one of these books can be read as a stand-alone ‘novel,’ because yes, the stories are all interconnected. But what’s even more amazing is that each one of the stories can also stand alone. It’s like a hat trick within a hat trick, a kind of literary magic.

The glue that holds it all together is one central character, Nina Bryant, a Southerner by birth, raised haphazardly by eccentric classical musician parents, and now a writer and teacher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (where the author taught for more than twenty years). She lives in a close-knit neighborhood (there are some neighbors’ stories in here too) with her husband and adopted daughter, Tavy (Octavia). In the two earlier books, we followed a forty-ish Nina, still recovering from an unsuccessful early marriage and an incestuous episode with her older brother (a talented artist and musician who drank himself to death), and desperately trying to find love and family. Ironically, she suddenly finds herself the adoptive mother of Tavy, the illegitimate child of her brother’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Babette. (Yes, she is actually her daughter’s great-aunt.) And, after a few near misses with various prospective suitors, she meets and marries Palmer Wright, a professor of medieval history. And oh, yes – there is also Nina’s “little dog,” who figures prominently throughout all three books and is important because he taught her she was capable of loving and taking care of another living creature before she got Tavy.

In this latest installment of the Nina trilogy, following a brief recap of her family history, presented charmingly in “Prologue: On Familiar Terms,” we learn more of Tavy’s biological mother. In “Shooting Star,” twenty-five years after she gave up her child to Nina, Babette is now BB, a Hollywood actress, still with Tavy’s father, a director and filmmaker. In “The Autobiography of My Mother(s),” when, as a teenager, Tavy wanted to know who her real father was, and Nina told her his name was Roy, Tavy thought, “I pictured him on horseback.” Then, when Nina added, Roy Dante – “I pictured him riding a horse into an inferno.” It made me laugh, that unlikely juxtaposition of Roy Rogers and Dante’s “Inferno.” And this is only one example of Cherry’s trademark use of comic relief, found often in all three books. And also perhaps a clue to the Dantean progression of Nina’s life – from her own personal hell, to purgatory, and, finally, to Paradise.

BB does come back to Madison to meet the daughter she abandoned so many years ago, as well as a granddaughter, Callie (Calliope). Because, like her mother, Tavy too had a child out of wedlock, but, unlike her mother, she kept the baby, and, with the full support of Nina and Palmer, is raising the child and pursuing her own passion as a painter.

Nina Bryant’s story is a generational one – her grandparents, her parents, her own troubled life, and that of her daughter, and beyond. But most of all it is Nina’s own story, a writer’s life lived in full. Nearing seventy, partly deaf with incipient cataracts, she is stricken with inoperable pancreatic cancer. In “Faith, Hope and Clarity,” Nina thinks back on her life and her “so-called career … because, to her, writing was not a career; it was a calling.” Knowing she is dying, plagued by progressing weakness and pain, she struggles to write one final thing, a paragraph at a time, a story with a protagonist named Nina. In one of these paragraphs she writes –
Style is the struggle for clarity, she knew. Hemingway or Henry James – each tried to get onto the page his vision, and as clearly as possible. A writer has a vision, and it precedes language: there are no words for it. She spends her time on earth in search of the right words and the right rhythms for them, that is, the words and rhythms that will convey her vision.
Like her character, Nina, author Kelly Cherry recognizes writing as a calling. She must. Why else would she have devoted more than twenty-five years to this trilogy? Perhaps the best explanation is provided by Nina herself, who, in explaining to Tavy why she continued to write in spite of her apparent lack of success, told her –
… it was about making something that would bring aesthetic happiness into the world … [i.e.] It’s what happens when you feel so fully and deeply that if you don’t share it you’ll burst. It’s what makes a person an artist.
Make no mistake: writing is an art, and Kelly Cherry is a great artist. Her vision has been achieved, and Nina Bryant may be her masterpiece. Read this book. Read the whole trilogy. You will laugh. You will cry. And, finally, you will grieve. I loved this book – these books. This is fiction at its finest. My highest recommendation.

(This review was originally published online in The Internet Review of Books in April 2015)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )