“ Miranda wished to stop hearing and talking, she wished to think for just five minutes of her own about Adam, really to think about him, but there was no time. She had seen him first ten days ago, and since then they had been crossing streets together, darting between trucks and limousines and pushcarts and farm wagons; he had waited for her in doorways and in little restaurants that smelled of stale frying fat; they had eaten and danced to the urgent whine and bray of jazz orchestras, they had sat in dull theaters because Miranda was there to write a piece about the play. Once they had gone to the mountains and, leaving the car, had climbed a stony trail, and had come out to a ledge upon a flat stone, where they sat and watched the lights change…
Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
I must have read one of Porter’s stories in high school, but I can’t remember it and this is the first time I’ve read her as an adult. I’m a sucker for great style, by which I guess I mean an ear for precisely right words arranged in a thoughtful kind of musical procession. How long did it take Porter, I wonder, to arrive at “urgent whine and bray?” How did she orchestrate such an extraordinary passage of desperate movement, leaking time? I wish I knew. Great stylists aren’t always as adept with plot and I’m cheered to find that Porter’s a double threat. Similar to Alice Munro, she tells novels in 50 pages without skimping on character, place, complex relationships, and like Munro she tells stories about the stories we tell ourselves and one another. How we make sense of things by ordering events, even when we order them wrong. My copy of Pale Horse, Pale Rider (a decrepit paperback from the mid-1960s whose original price was 60 cents!) also includes “Old Mortality” and “Noon Wine,” both graceful and moving and full of sad, shy life, even as they’re meditations on death. I need to read more of her.
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raggedbutright said:
YES!
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barthel said:
love Porter
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anythingcouldhappen posted this
