Customer Reviews

The Stories of Alice Adams

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Adams may be the most underrated American woman short story writer of the later twentieth century. The other two reviewers seem to have missed all the subtlety and artistry of these fine stories, which deal with racism, women's work and relationships, and the triumph of individual spirit over cliched expectations.

I read most of these stories when they were first published, many of them in the New Yorker, and loved them. Maybe it's because I was younger, but when new the stories impressed me enormously, both for their plots and Adams's writing style. This time around, most of them left me cold; they were mannered and remote in comparison to today's stories. I suppose Adams's writing is simply out of style, but it came as a huge surprise.

I came upon a $4.99 edition of The Stories Of Alice Adams. Her name was familiar as a staple of the New Yorker-Harper's-Atlantic axis of late 20th Century literature. Yet, I need not have known that fact for after reading the tales it was clear that her stories were perfectly constructed into the tidy formulae needed to get an in into that world. This is not to say that she was a bad writer, just that she was predictable and formulaic. In a sense she was the John Updike of short stories, save she had a better understanding of the human condition- certainly not a great one, but better than Updike.

Here's a typical Alice Adams story: a great opening paragraph with a twist that makes it stand out, WASPy Southern self-loathing characters- usually female artistes, a mushy middle with rather banal conversations, and a trip to an exotic locale, or the introduction of an odd character, a smattering of yuppies and wannabe sophisticates, and a very weak ending. Of course, in the book of 53 tales there are some exceptions, and these tend to be the best of the stories. Most of the tales that deal with love tend to veer toward the sudsy- definitely at about the level of a typical soap opera character. I could net get Susan Lucci's Erica Kane character from All My Children out of my head in tale after tale of high class heroines. Yet, it is a very artificial emotional plane. While not as utterly void as a John Updike character, nor as ragingly impotent as a Raymond Carver hero, the typical Adam's character has the dull life of a Willa Cather character, yet with pomp, the small emotional situation of a Eudora Welty character, save for letting it play in a nicer, richer world, and the hypocrisy and self-delusion of a Fitzgerald character, save for living in a more modern time. All in all a mixed stew of potentials. Unfortunately, probably because she was getting published so regularly in the New Yorker magazine, this stunted her growth as a writer, so that the above mentioned characteristics did not become leaping off points, but the perimeter of her fiction from the 1950s till her death in 1999.

Thus, her tales are, with few exceptions, all from an aging omniscient third person, yet female, point of view. The stories, in many ways are interchangeable, and too long. It's like living in a world of gray people, in which shades of hue are minor to the reader and character. Unlike a Welty or a Flannery O'Connor, the Adams archetype is a predictably Freudian Women's Libber with faithless lover, alcohol problems, a pet substituting for a man, and a raging libido, yet, almost always plagued with a desire to dash that in one form or another.

Here is a typically good Adams opening paragraph, from the typically soap operatic tale Snow, about four people and their tribulations:



On a trail high up in the California Sierra, between heavt smooth white snowbanks, four people on cross-country skis form a straggling line. A man and three women: Graham, dark and good-looking, a San Francisco architect, who is originally from Georgia; Carol, his girlfriend, a grey-eyed blonde, a florist; Susannah, daughter of Graham, dark and fat and now living in Venice, California; and, quite a way behind Susannah, tall thin Rose, Susannah's friend and lover. Susannah and Rose both have film-related jobs- Graham has never been quite sure what they do.

Note the last sentence, which sets up a hint of something needed to be unraveled or possibly resolved. It's a small detail, but the sort of little things that propels people through life, in a real way.

Now its end, and, regardless of what the tale in between was, look at how utterly flaccid and banal this paragraph is- dramatically and verbally:



In the middle of the night, in what has become a storm- lashing snow and violent wind- Rose wakes up, terrified. From the depths of bad dreams, she has no idea where she is, what time it is, what day. With whom she is. She struggles for clues, her wide eyes scouring the dark, her tentative hands reaching out, encountering Susannah's familiar, fleshy back. Everything comes into focus for her; she knows where she is. She breathes out softly, `Oh, thank God it's you,' moving closer to her friend.

Note how every sentence is trite and every modifier predictable- this is clichéd writing at its worse, but now return to the opening paragraph. In that declivity you see the starting and ending points for virtually every Adams tale- a promising start, but a banal, predictable end. Adams had potential greatness, but a propensity for copping out narratively. Whether this was her natural self's fault or the need to crank out fodder for the magazines that published her does not matter. But, at least it got her published by the Big Boys.

Adams, Alice, Rich Rewards. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980.
Alice Adams published dozens of stories and novels about women alone, but this one seems to have been dashed off without much thought. We follow the first person narrator, Daphne, from her twenty-something affair with a Frenchman, Jean-Paul, through many years of this and that, not amounting to much. She becomes an interior decorator in San Francisco and is enmeshed with a family in rapid disintegration. She is robbed, struck by a man, befriends gays, does some work, but her emotional state is neutral. The reader could care less. The climax comes when word of Jean-Paul's visit to the U.S. arrives and Daphne goes to pieces after having no contact for twenty years. Why? Pretty unconvincing, was my verdict.