...In the Friscalating Dusklight

Ghosts of Wyoming
by Alison Hagy
2010, Graywolf Press


During the ELA MCAS every year I stock up with several books. It's hard to get through several days of testing (several hours each) without some brain candy. A few weeks ago, I was forging through Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming and had it out on my desk when a colleague stopped by to drop off extra #2's or something. Upon seeing the book, she exclaimed, "Ooh! Ghosts!" While my knee-jerk reaction was to explain that the "ghosts" in question were haunting figures of the past who have imbued Wyoming with a sense of hard-earned history, I just laughed a little and grabbed the pencils.

This turned out to be true. Hagy's stories were indeed populated by those "haunting figures of the past" etc. But imagine my surprise when I discovered my coworker wasn't so off the mark after all - in at least one story in this collection a bona fide ghost appears, an occurrence that in and of itself would not necessarily turn me off. (I do, after all have an enormous affection for magical realism and the likes of Garcia Marquez and Aimee Bender.)

Ghosts of Wyoming is somewhat disjointed in tone. The book opens with a tragic gem of a story called "Border" in which a teenage runaway steals a Collie puppy to be a travel companion during his journey to flee his past. It is a difficult story to read because its emotional impact is quite powerful. It is simultaneously a portrait of people at their best and at their worst, and is about the disappointments that ensue when we confuse the two.

The second story, "Brief Lives of Trainmen", functions as a series of sketches adopting similar voices of people working at a train yard. The story is interesting to read despite its lack of plot. It feels as though it would be better placed as a prologue of sorts to a longer novel. Hagy manages to persuasively capture the voices of these men but does not imbue them with any of the urgency that creates interesting fiction, or even the most basic semblance of conflict.

Up to this point, I was pretty satisfied with Hagy's collection. "Border" was a fine story, "Trainmen" an interesting exercise in voice. The third story in the collection, entitled "How Bitter the Weather", is where she began to lose me. The story concerns a narrator who is sleeping with a man named Armand who has disappeared. It took me about ten pages to figure out whether the narrator was a man or a woman, and by the time I did, it was too late to work up a sufficient emotional reaction to the narrator's plight. (In retrospect, the character is referred to by name in dialogue on the second page of the story, which I apparently missed.)

The ghost story, "Superstitions of the Indians", occurs about half-way through the book and where the stories that have come before it were rough, gritty little stories written in realistic mode, "Superstitions" is downright silly. A graduate student meets a ghost in the stacks at the research library who infects the student with tuberculosis or something and subsequently helps the grad student win the championship in Frisbee golf. It's a turn so befuddlingly off the Wyoming road map Hagy has been crafting that it created a stumbling block that I needed several days off before I could continue reading the collection.

When I finally picked the book back up, the damage had clearly been done. The next piece, "Oil & Gas" was structurally similar to the preceding "Trainmen" story in its alternating points of view and actually did seem to have a plot. But I was disappointed to find that this plot was buried in the story like anthropological artifacts under layers of sand and silt, waiting for an industrious fellow to excavate them carefully. After my encounter with the librarian Frisbee golf-enthusiast ghost, I was far too impatient for such an undertaking and was contented instead to glean snatches of plot when possible.

My experience with the book quickly went from bad to worse. The next story, "The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain", was so riddled with arch, self-serious prose that I was frequently laughing out loud, reminded as I was of Owen Wilson's Cormac McCarthyesque nonsense in The Royal Tenenbaums. One passage in particular truly tickled my fancy:

Her mother said dreams were to be saved, written down as soon as you could get from your pillow to a pencil. But Livia almost never remembered her sleep dreams. If she could have designed a dream like she sometimes designed beaded hatbands, the dream would be about flying - soaring over the Red Mask Ranch, gliding up the silver vein of the river into the black shadow heart of the Absaroka Mountains where nobody went except sheep hunters and loners who believed it was important to walk all the way into Yellowstone Park. If she could fly like hat, she'd know where the raspberries first came ripe in August. Where cow elk bedded down for the morning. Where the cutthroat trout were fat, unhidden, unhurried.

Beaded hatbands? This kind of completely bombastic, self-conscious folksiness pervades the rest of the book. It reads like an E. Annie Proulx undergraduate discard. It could also inspire a new parlor-game where at the end of each one of these sentences you could tack on the Eli Cash-ism "in the friscalating dusklight." "Where cow elk bedded down for the morning... in the friscalating dusklight." See? It works!

Once the prose took such a floral turn for the worse, Ghosts of Wyoming was a struggle. It took several days to read only sixty or so more pages.

I was truly surprised to discover that the last story in the collection, "The Sin Eaters", was as strong a story as the first in the book. "The Sin Eaters", based in part on true accounts, tells the tale of a missionary caught in a bloodbath between lawless frontiersmen. The story, whose prose was only marginally less ridiculous than that quoted above, managed to evoke a quietly amoral mood that was riveting. "Sin Eaters", while self-serious, was not self-conscious or forced. The story accumulates great dramatic momentum and I followed the story with a great sense of unease.

Hagy's prose in this final story successfully walks the line between the ridiculous and the gripping:

The gathering heat of the day began to take its toll. Porterfield wiped real and imagined perspiration from his brow. Twice he asked Drumlin to halt the freighter so he might relieve himself among the prairie grasses. Still, the pangs in his bowels rose like air bladders to press against his lungs. Drumlin talked of Lander, of the great mountains there, but Porterfield could not make sense of the driver's words - the phrases seemed strangely purloined from his own unfinished letter to Phyllis.

This reads to me eerie and haunting, unlike the dream ostentation of early passages in the book.

"The Sin Eaters" is long. Its plot gathers and disperses like sand in a windstorm and its characters are obscured from the reader, as though glimpsing figures in turmoil through such a storm, at a distance. The effect is distressing, and all the more magical for it.

While I was relieved to see Hagy redeem her book with the final story, the emotion that lingers for me after having read it is sharp disappointment. Such mastery as is evident in "Border" and "The Sin Eaters" is not maintained throughout the collection. The book is susceptible to sketchy writing exercises and downright silly writing and these missteps are more painful when compared with the highs of its bookend pieces. I'm not sure if the book would have benefited more from a less indulgent editor or a larger pool of writing from which to select the work. Either way, I don't doubt I will read Hagy again, even though it will be with a wary eye.