SERVANTS OF THE MAP
by Andrea Barrett
W.W. Norton & Company, 2002
I once heard this definition of a great short story: fiction that takes mere minutes to read and a lifetime to forget. Of the hundreds (thousands?) of short stories I have read in my lifetime, I have read two such stories. I read each in a single sitting, but they spoke to me in a way I will never quite shake. One of these was in a collection of stories that won the National Book Award in 1996, SHIP FEVER, by Andrea Barrett. The story, called ‘The Littoral Zone’ is as vivid in my mind today as it was when I read it a decade ago. And so when I walked into the local used book store and browsed their new fiction shelf, I was thrilled to see SERVANTS OF THE MAP, a second story collection by Barrett. As I was facing the holiday weekend without any fiction on hand, I picked it up.
Part of the attraction of Barrett’s writing, for me, is the science. Each of her stories is built upon some intriguing scientific foundation: the discovery of fossils and the subsequent fury to understand their meaning in the context of a world centered by humans and created by God, the quixotic and pressure-filled life of the fast-track academic scientist, the causes and cures for consumption. But science alone cannot explain my delight in these stories. There are the characters, so rich and complicated, at once annoying and sympathetic. And there are the connections, the movement of characters across time and across the stories in a fluid and uncomplicated way that makes SERVANTS OF THE MAP read almost like a novel. Each story illuminates the one before it and, of course, the one after it. By the end I found myself entrenched and intrigued and prepared to simply turn back to the first story and read it anew, armed with all I had learned since I read it last.
Short stories fit nicely around the cooking and cleaning and gardening and playing and entertaining and visiting and resting that inevitably fill weekends around here. And since I didn’t know this collection was so connected, it was a pleasant surprise to have my snippets of reading tie themselves together in such a neat and fulfilling way. I highly recommend this book!
Best,
Loree
Ps. By the way, the other short story I can’t shake is ‘Quitters, Inc.’ by Stephen King. Seriously creepy story that I have never been able to forget.