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Summary
Summary
From a prizewinning young writer whose stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South comes a heartwarming and hugely appealing debut collection that explores the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world.
Megan Mayhew Bergman's twelve stories capture the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can't be denied. In "Housewifely Arts," a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African Gray Parrot that can mimic her deceased mother's voice. A population control activist faces the ultimate conflict between her loyalty to the environment and her maternal desire in "Yesterday's Whales." And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker.
As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us.
Author Notes
Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in North Carolina and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, and Narrative . She lives in Shaftsbury, Vermont, with her veterinarian husband, two daughters, and several animals.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bergman's stellar debut is set among the dense forests and swamps of her native North Carolina and rooted firmly in a crumbling and economically troubled post-crash America. These 12 short stories, all but two of which were published in journals like One Story, Ploughshares, and Narrative (and anthologized in the Best American and New Stories from the South series), may be tethered to familiar Southern gothic tropes, but Bergman deftly sidesteps cliche and sentimentality, using honest autobiographical moments to make her work unique (like Yannick Murphy (The Call), Bergman's husband is a veterinarian, a character that appears in several stories). Reflections on the natural world, animals both domestic and wild, family, and death figure prominently as motifs. In the title story, a young woman who lives with her father in backwoods North Carolina confronts her loneliness and her father's mortality when an attractive stranger engages them to help find a woodpecker believed to be extinct. While Bergman's tone is melancholic, a sense of possibility and rebirth figures prominently. "Six times he'd eaten a sock. Five times it had come out the other side, worse for wear, composted," says the narrator of "The Two-Thousand-Dollar Sock," a struggling new mother whose dog survives the sock only to take on a bear desperate for a taste of honey. Bergman writes straightforward, elegant prose that dovetails nicely with swampy Americana, and possesses a great facility for off-kilter observations. A woman in "Housewifely Arts" learns the details of her mother's mourning for her dead husband from a parrot, and worries after her own child: "The things my body has done to him, I think. Cancer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math-these are my gifts." Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
These 12 stories, 10 previously published in literary magazines and anthologies, are linked thematically by their focus on the lives of contemporary adult women and the presence of animals in their daily lives. Bergman has a facility for characterization that makes the stories echo in memory long after the first reading. Take The Cow That Milked Itself, which is the story of a growing family and the sensitivity (or lack thereof) of a husband to the concerns of his pregnant wife. The title story presents a thirtysomething woman whose father is convinced that the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker survives on his heavily forested land. Stylistic elements mark Bergman's writing as unique. She shuns quotation marks but frequently uses dialogue and sprinkles even the darkest stories with touches of humor. Many of these stories have climaxes like the tail of the scorpion: they curl back on themselves with a powerful sting. Readers will be shocked, amazed, and always entertained by the work of this accomplished writer of short fiction.--Loughran, Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN'S first story collection, "Birds of a Lesser Paradise," begins with a woman driving hundreds of miles to see a parrot. She can't stand the bird, which sings Patsy Cline tunes and tells off imaginary telemarketers, but it has one trick worth listening to: It sounds just like her dead mother. The two women didn't get along, but now that the mother is gone, the daughter longs to hear her familiar voice, even coming from a beady-eyed mimic. This memorable story, called "Housewifely Arts" and included in "The Best American Short Stories 2011," sets the tone for the 11 offerings to follow. In complicated ways, creatures great and small affect the lives of human characters, who treat the animals' ailments, track them in the wild or adopt them as members of the family. A wolf hybrid permanently disfigures a veterinarian's face. A woman's father suffers a heart attack while searching for an ivory-billed woodpecker, a species most likely extinct. An alcoholic mother volunteers with the "Feed an Aye-Aye a Raisin program at the Lemur Center," less as an act of magnanimity than of desperation. Her relationships with humans have failed - her husband left when she quit rehab, her daughter believes in imminent apocalypse - but, she supposes, "animals I could do." The nonhuman characters in Bergman's collection include dogs, cows, sheep and silkie bantams. The chickens, wonderfully described as parading "around the coop like 'Solid Gold' dancers," sprint toward their food in a manner that delights their owner. "That's how you get what you want," she thinks. "Go all out or give up." Longing to conceive a child but afraid it's too late, she apologizes to the hens: "I'm sorry I eat your children before they hatch." In another story, a woman dying of cancer advises her daughter, "Make peace with the food chain. . . . Do it now, before it breaks your heart." Many of these characters already walk around with broken hearts, their homes overtaken by feral cats, crickets, and stray dogs they invite in like itinerant lovers. Yet we don't feel sorry for them. They draw strength from their self-sufficient isolation and their alliances with nonverbal misfits - even as they dream of babies, and effusive phone calls, and a blue heron circling the rooftops, looking for a place to land. The story that closes the collection, "The Two-Thousand-Dollar Sock," is as delicately sad as the parrot story that begins it. An ailing dog sprints into the woods on the trail of a black bear, its final act a passionate chase. After burying her pet, the narrator observes that her baby daughter, too, "understands the urge to have what you must have." New to the world, "she still trusts the raw pull of desire. One day it will tear her away, . . . take her down a dirt road to a place she does not recognize, and there she will make her home." We want stories to stir our desires. We also want them to lead us to places we don't recognize and build us a temporary residence there. Bergman provides alluring glimpses into the strangeness, the ruthlessness, of the animal kingdom. We learn that "in captivity, the jaguar mother is capable of devouring her own cubs"; that "today's whales sing lower songs, and no one knows why"; that superstitious villagers in Madagascar claim aye-ayes can "pierce" a human aorta "with their middle finger." At times while reading "Birds of a Lesser Paradise," I wished it would send us deeper into the woods, and more fiercely stalk the mysteries that elude us, disturb us, tear us apart. As a first expedition, though, it offers plenty of plumage for us to train our binoculars on, as well as bird calls that force us to stop and listen. 'Make peace with the food chain,' a dying woman tells her daughter. 'Do it now, before it breaks your heart.' Polly Rosenwaike has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Millions and other publications.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With this debut story collection, Bergman establishes herself as a writer with a clear, striking narrative voice and a distinctive view of the world and its animal inhabitants, including our human selves. The story "Housewifely Arts" features a parrot sought by the daughter of its deceased owner as a way to remember the timbre of her mother's voice. Another story involves a woman who works in an animal shelter and refuses to give up any of the animals she keeps at home-three golden retrievers with assorted missing parts and other infirmities, one declawed raccoon, a one-eyed chinchilla, a cormorant, and several feral cats-for the sake of a long-term relationship with a rather nice man who also hunts geese with a bow and arrow. The deals we make with the world around us and with the assorted others who inhabit it, and the solace we find in our fellow creatures, are the larger concerns of these memorable stories. VERDICT This is an immensely appealing collection with a rare clarity and cohesion and the capacity to appeal to a wide-ranging audience, including readers who may generally eschew the genre.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Birds of a Lesser Paradise I fell for Smith the day my father hit his first hole-in-one on his homemade golf course. Dad had spent years shaping the earth in our backyard until he had two holes that landed somewhere between an extravagant minigolf spread and a Jack Nicklaus par-72. Mae! my father yelled, hoisting his nine-iron into the air. I did it! He was a couple hundred yards away, and because I didn't think my voice would carry, I jumped up and down a few times and clapped my hands, trying to appear visibly thrilled. But I was self-conscious with Smith standing behind me, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his army-green cargo pants, an anxious scowl on his almost beautiful face. Dad sauntered off to pluck the winning ball from the hole, long, white beard trailing in the wind, his spaniel, Betsy, two steps behind. It was hardly fifty degrees out, but Dad was wearing shorts and hiking boots. He was nearing seventy, but he had the bulging calf muscles of a man half his age. I want to see birds no one else has seen, Smith was saying. I printed out the checklist for North Carolina. How soon can we mark these off? Slow down, I said, smiling. I don't know if I can tell a common goldeneye from a loon, he said. Is that important? He followed me to our picnic table, which was soft from rot and green with moss. Smith stuck his fingers into his bramble-thick hair, hair the color of sea grass. It seemed inclined to one side, like a plant reaching for the sun. He wore a paint-flecked T-shirt covered in a school of dolphin fish. First, I said, let me tell you what we can see here in the Great Dismal Swamp. I opened our brochure, pushed it toward him like a menu. We had a chunk of land outside of town that had been in my father's family for two generations. We lived in his ancestral home and ran Pocosin Birds, our bird-watching business, from the property. In April, I began, birders can expect to sight fifty to one hundred bird species in the swamp. Are you reading backward? Smith asked. I have it memorized, I said. I studied his face. His left eye was deep brown, his right hazel. For a moment, I wondered if he had a glass eye. Eyes like David Bowie, I said, nodding my head in approval. Are you going to take me into the swamp? he asked. He smiled. He was lean and dark from the sun. I couldn't tell if he was twenty-five or just short of forty, impoverished or on the receiving end of a trust fund. When he smiled, he looked like too much fun to be thirty, as if he wasn't tired of the world yet. Typically, I said, we help our clients assemble the correct gear and map a course. We drop you off at daybreak. I took a red pen from my pocket and circled an area near Lake Drummond. The best nesting sites for warblers are here, I said. What do you know about songbirds? I want to go in with you, he said. Dad was born on the outskirts of the swamp at a time when it was desolate, hard, and flecked with ramshackle hunting cabins. His father had been into timber, and Dad was raised wild--the kind of man who could pick up a snake by its neck with the confidence I'd exhibit picking up a rubber version in a toy store. He was sentimental about his family home and the town. Anything he was used to having around he wanted to keep around. So when the town got too small to sustain a post office, he converted the blue mail drops into composting hubs in the back corner of our lot. He bought the abandoned elementary school at auction for almost nothing--no one wanted to pay the taxes on it, and looters had already taken the copper pipes and pedestal sinks. He rented it out for birthday parties, weddings, and to local artists for studio space. When a developer leveled the city park, Dad reassembled the jungle gym in our side yard near the garden and let the scuppernong vines go wild. We lived in a dying town with a dwindling tax base. I never thought I'd come back, but the swamp was in me; if Dad was half feral, I was one-quarter. I liked the way the water tasted, the sound of birds outside my window in the morning. A few years in Raleigh studying conservation biology at the state university and I needed to find a place where I could look out my window and see nothing man-made. I missed the smell of things rotting, the sun bearing down on a wet log. Nothing in the city seemed real to me--it was fabricated, plastic, artificial, fast. After years of biology classes, every come-on was a mating call, every bar conversation a display--a complicated modern spin on ancient rules. I didn't believe in altruistic acts--I could find a selfish root to anything. Eventually I felt as if I was looking out at the busy world and I could see nothing but its ugly bones. I was taught that at the heart of all people, all things, lay raw self-interest. Sure, you could dress a person up nice, put pretty words in his mouth, but underneath the silk tie and pressed shirt was an animal. A territorial, hungry animal anxious to satisfy his own needs. At least in the swamp, there was no make-believe chivalry, no playing nice. It was eat or be eaten out there, life at its purest, and it's where I wanted to be. Another thing--I loved my dad. I'd never known my mother--she'd died just after giving birth to me--so he was all I'd ever had. He was honest, fun, and unapologetically himself. I'm not asking you to come home, my dad said, when I approached him with the idea. You won't find a husband here, he added. I don't want one, I'd said--and for a while, that had been the truth. Perhaps it was all the years I'd watched my father carve out a happy life alone. Your old room is packed solid, he'd said. I disassembled a tobacco barn. Numbered the slats. You can't move in 'til I sell it. I'll take the room over the garage, I said. I have some money to fix it up--I'll put in a shower. Aside from serving in Korea and a short stint living on a houseboat in his twenties, Dad had remained hidden from the world in the swamp, inhabiting the same house, trapping the same illegal lines, fishing the same shallow waters. We didn't watch the market or follow politics. That was part of the appeal, for me anyway. For centuries people had used the swamp to hide from their problems. Runaway slaves, ruthless fugitives, shell-shocked soldiers, and cheating wives--all had hidden in the swamp at one time. When I moved from the city to the swamp, the things I could not have became special again. Cappuccino was special. Driving forty minutes to eat second-rate Indian food was special. Planning a day around the "good" grocery store--special. You got about half fancy living out of town, Dad told me. I was a thirty-six-year-old single woman living in a poor man's theme park, running birding trips into the swamp. Most of my binocular-laden clients were pushing sixty and just as concerned with sunscreen and hydration as they were with spotting a pileated woodpecker. I drove them into the swamp in Dad's pickup, left them with a map, a bagged lunch, water, a GPS device, and a phone, and picked them up at twilight in a place that seemed less wild every day. For the most part, I was happy. Excerpted from Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
