by Susan Ellis
My friendās mother has one of those wonderful, slow, thick Southern voices; the kind you rarely hear anymore, filled with sugary hi-honeyās. According to my friend, though, the minute guests are out the door, the accent and demeanor are gone quicker than you can say, "More iced tea?"
I think of this now after reading Ellen Gilchristās latest collection of stories, The Courts of Love. Gilchrist has a made a career of writing about slightly crazed folks, mostly Southern and mostly women, who find themselves in perhaps fantastic but always believable misadventures. Yet, in the bulk of The Courts of Love, Gilchrist seems to be experimenting, trying on different personas, pretending sheās John Grisham or the writer of one of those Star Trek series. Will the real Ellen Gilchrist please stand up?
The Courts of Love is divided into two parts: "Nora Jane and Company" and "Stories." The trouble with the stories in "Nora Jane" is that they lack the restraint of Gilchristās earlier work. She juggles the perspectives between the main character Nora Jane, who is the beautiful mother of twin girls who have two different fathers, and her husband Freddy and their closest friend Nieman, who happens to be a movie critic, and other various friends. So far so good. Then, Gilchrist takes an odd turn that begins with this sentence: "The Muslim fundamentalist sect to which Navin Backer belonged was not closely aligned with the group that blew up the World Trade Center but it was sympathetic to it." What follows is a strange and bloody murder. And things only get stranger.
In "You Must Change Your Life," Nieman meets Leonardo da Vinci, puts him in a parka, feeds him cheese, and takes him cruising around in his jeep. The reason for da Vinciās visit to this bored film critic (he can barely sit through a whole movie anymore) is some sort of divine inspiration. Gilchristās prose is flowery and heavy-handed. Says da Vinci when the pair cut their ocean visit short to see a microscope, "I am honored to be here for your birth of understanding. Where I am, the minds are past their early enthusiasm. I miss seeing the glint in eyes. I miss the paintbrush in my hand and the smell of paints. If you wish to show me this microscope we can go there now. The sea is very old. We donāt have to stand beside it all day." Nieman doesnāt even remember his birth of understanding (as painful as it was ÷ at least for us to read), but sometimes he does feel tingly all over.
Throughout this first section, Gilchrist links all the events together. For example, da Vinci leaves a cape under Niemanās bed. The twins use it to save a life, and then it ends up in the hands of a couple of dirty-mouthed orphans who come to use it as a talisman to protect them from Ritalin and being unloved and then they get adopted by the Niemanās fianceās cousin. E. Annie Proulx used the same device, sending a green accordion through the centuries, in the damn-near unreadable Accordion Crimes. Itās the literary version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Salvation does come, however, in the second half. Here, Gilchrist thankfully reverts. These stories are largely both funny and sly. The best of the bunch is "Desecration." This story revolves around a 13-year-old girl whose life is ruined when doesnāt make cheerleader. How ruined? She comes this close to being sacrificed for a cult.
Also included is "Paradise." This is the type of story that Gilchrist has perfected in previous short-story collections, such as Rhoda and Victory Over Japan. It involves an older woman who is working on a degree in anthropology and dreams of exploring underwater caves in France. Along the way, she gets distracted by a neighbor and winds up in a debauched fling. But, she says, it was "worth the two rounds of antibiotics."
While half of The Courts of Love is disposable, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Included with the book is a buy-one-get-one-free coupon. You can simply skip the first half, get one of her earlier books, and call it a draw.