THE Wide Net and Other Stories [Paperback]

Eudora Welty (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace; 2nd edition (1971)
• ASIN: B000V04YA6
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Three men and a heron, October 24, 2009

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wide Net And Other Stories (Paperback)

`The Mississippi shuddered and lifted from its bed, reaching like a somnambulist driven to go in new places; the ice stretched far out over the waves.' Page one of First Love, the first story in this collection.

The Wide Net was Welty's second published short story collection. It came out in 1943, and all stories had been published previously.
In her first story book (Curtain of Green), I was a little unhappy with some of the stories. They seemed to me examples of a certain simplistic genre, where writer and reader conspire to make fun of the stupidity of people, and where we are watching grotesque people or grotesque events, like readers of yellow press products.

The Wide Net does not have that kind of writing, and that alone is reason why I like it better. But I still don't like it all the way. The language is fresh and aggressive, but also flawed. Please look at the sentence that I quote above, from First Love. It shows both, the strength and the failure of Welty's style. It is all very nice for the river to shudder and reach etc; but never will ice stretch far out over waves. That just does not happen in this world, unless I totally misunderstand the meaning of this sentence.

The title story tells us of a young man who is afraid that his young pregnant wife may have jumped into the river. He calls a friend and most of the neighborhood men, and starts dredging the river with a wide net. We expect a drama and are given a farce. The men have a jolly good fishing day. A lovely story, but a little inconsequential. As it is, I like it better than if it had stayed on its starting course of drama.

Welty lets us meet historical persons.
Aaron Burr and his treason trial are observed through the eyes of a deaf 12 year old orphan who works in a Natchez Inn as a bootblack.
Audubon meets, by coincidence, 2 other historical figures, an evangelist on a soul fishing trip, and an outlaw on his hunt for robbery victims, in a moment of silent beauty. Which gets disturbed by Audubon, the pragmatist. Something for birders.

More of a mythical nature: Asphodel, the Greek underworld's location for the boring neutral souls, who are neither heroic nor damnable, is visited by 3 spinsters who tell each other of a friend's exciting and dramatic life.
We also have stories on the edge of the esoteric (the little girl moving in and out of dreams during a storm, and finding real life evidence of her imagined play mate next day; the gambling place where the same old woman with a purple hat shows up every day over 30 years and gets killed twice...). Not my favorite genre either, but better than `Southern Gothic'.

I don't know Welty's later work yet, but her moving away from the early `realism' is still unclear to me. Where was she going? I will have to read the Golden Apples to find out.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars First Read, October 9, 2009

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wide Net And Other Stories (Paperback)

I waited way too long to read Eudora Welty, but for those in the same situation, The Wide Net is a fine place to start. In reading, you will likely be reminded of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Clearly a Southern writer like them, Welty respects her often peculiar characters. She uses sly humer well, as in the title story where a bridegroom searching the river for his presumably drowned wife nonetheless is able to haul up a slew of fish to be sold on the streets of town. Each of her main characters is memorable, with the finely drawn quirkiness that stamps them as individuals. Of the eight stories here, the best are The Wide Net, First Love, A Still Moment and The Purple Hat. Only Asphodel and At the Landing didn't work for me in their attempts -- I think -- to spin realism into myth. Her fine attention to detail and description stays with a reader long after the story's end. When she nails something, it stays nailed. For example, it will be some time before I forget the scene of the deaf bootblack boy watching a sleeping Aaron Burr in First Love, and this passage from that scene -- "The heart is secret even when the moment it dreamed of has come, a moment when there might have been a revelation...." Or this evocation of New Orleans that opens The Purple Hat -- "It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery relection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans."

3.0 out of 5 stars Welty from the perspective of an uneducated warehouse man, December 12, 2011

By 

Peter M. Bush "Peter Michael Bush" (Georgia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wide Net And Other Stories (Paperback)

I found myself back and forth with this one. Alternating bouts of understanding and bafflement depending on the story. Feeling like a smarty-man one minute and an idiot the next. Through it all, though, the writing remains the saving grace. The language is special and the style is one I can easily snuggle up to.

"First Love": Though it tends to the verbose in a lot of the descriptives, the involvement of Aaron Burr was a hook that grabbed me full on. The depiction of Burr is wonderfully larger than life, and the response of the deaf boy protagonist to it is heart-wrenching.

"The Wide Net": To be honest, this one almost made me put the book down for good. It has the feel of the mythical about it, but for the life of me that was as far as I got out of it. The first few paragraphs and the last few lend themselves to a snippet of vague understanding, but the bulk of the story, while surreally interesting, is confounding.

"A Still Moment": Perhaps my favorite story in the book. The three main characters are vivd and disparate and the ending caught me nicely off guard. A nice little bit of existential wonder in the woods.

"Asphodel": This one was weird. Cool and surreal like a bad dream. I loved it, but did not get it or the source material. The description of the main female character's impact on the town is some of the best stuff I have ever read. But in the end, I was flumoxed.

"The Winds": For some reason this reminded me of Viginia Woolf; it has that in and out of consciousness feel to it. It meanders a bit, but the central ideas of aloness and youth versus adulthood are beautifully conveyed.

"The Purple Hat": Kind of a departure from the feel of the other stories (it takes place almost entirely indoors and has the feel of the underbelly of every bar story ever told) it is one of the more (seemingly) straightforward stories in the book. Though it misdirects with a lot of metaphysical hullabaloo, it was one of the strories that did not leave me scratching my bald head.

"Livvie": for me, it was the most beautifully written of the stories, but the ending is so very vague that it takes away from that aspect of it. I wound up thinking too much about the ending and not reflecting on the words.

"At the Landing": Gotta be honest, did not care for this one. I thought I was going to, but I lost interest right before the flood. The ending is either humdrum or horrifying, I can't tell which.

Not much more to tell you. Not an easy read, but well worth it as an exercise in reading literary fiction. Still, it is not a very fun read. There is much to ponder, much to figure out. The language is fantastic and Welty's style (modernest, visceral, vivid and vague) leans toward my taste, but in the end, I sort of felt like a moron who should have finished college.