A haunting narrative arc extends over Jill McCorkle’s latest collection of stories. In the titular story that opens Old Crimes (Algonquin, 2024), just out in paperback, a twenty-year-old woman is on a holiday break with her college boyfriend, but the romance feels as worn as the tattered pinwheels decking every table in the motel’s dining room. Her boyfriend has graduated, will soon enter law school, but Lynn has two years left. She isn’t sure what interests her more: the unsolved mysteries she learns about in archeology class of the Tollund Man and Yde Girl, ancient figures preserved in bogs whose secrets she can only guess at, or her creative writing class, where she must supply the mystery. To satisfy an assignment for the latter, she conjures an image of a belt hanging on the back of a door. The opening line is: “In a room, behind a door, a man takes off his belt.” The story never resolves for her, is never meaningful in her own life, although her development, the challenges ahead, are pointed to by the story’s end.
That menacing belt appears in the life of another character, named Loris Ward, whose disturbing confession we encounter in “Low Tones.” This is such a powerful manifestation of fiction: as writers, much as we make stuff up, we are always writing someone’s story. Is it true? Did this really happen? the reader often asks. It is always true—for someone, somewhere, sometime. Loris’s son is estranged from her, and her husband is dying. She’s content to lose her hearing, not wanting to listen to more praise about her husband from the community—a man who abused her with his fists and her son with a big-hammer-buckled belt—or her son’s repeated question: “Why are you still there, Mom?”
In the concluding story, “Sparrow,” a divorced mother of two is starting over in an idyllic town in the northeast, hundreds of miles from her southern beginnings. She’s never given a name, and only with small hints do we realize she is Lynn from the first pages. The point of view is first-person, in a voice more personal, older and wiser than in the first story, and less wary of the world. Not everything has turned out as she’d hoped, including this failed marriage. The scene of her announcing the divorce to her children, “clearly defin[ing] the before and after,” is a gut blow:
You say the words to your children and watch their faces—this one was just asking for chocolate milk and that one wants you to take the itchy tag from her shirt—but then there are tears and a ball kicked across the room and by the end of day, many dents from a baseball in the garage door and perplexing questions like will we still eat dinner tonight? Will Santa still come and know where to go?
The scene is intimate, due to the second-person “you,” and the tone is conversational throughout: “At Christmas we pretended we were in a movie, decorating the tree there on the porch.” I felt I was alongside her on the porch swing, lulled back into my own early years of motherhood, when the responsibility to keep alive a tiny, helpless person felt immense. The how could yous? that echo through this tale plagued me then: How could you forget? Because, in my case, I often forgot—once, to turn the stove off, leaving a plastic tray to dry near a burner. It flamed, eventually spreading beyond what my little kitchen fire extinguisher could handle. Holding my daughter, I called the fire department, and we ducked below the toxic plastic fumes to escape outdoors. The stove and the linoleum flooring couldn’t be recovered—but we were safe. Another time, I tried to soothe my child by swinging her in her carrier, forgetting she wasn’t strapped in. She flew out . . . mercifully into my brother’s arms. What were you thinking? There were other lapses, enough to make me think I was unfit, but now I believe these were the early finger-waggings from the world, putting me on notice that no one is capable of fully protecting a child from harm. “Sparrow” pokes at us—you may be an adult and a mother, a good one, but you might not perceive a threat when you see it.
Lynn meets a woman whom she believes is the grandmother of a Little League player. We realize she is Loris Ward, from the earlier story “Low Tones.” Loris tells Lynn, “No mother should ever choose a man over her baby.” But that is exactly what Loris did years ago by ignoring her husband’s abuse of her son. I am reminded of Alice Munro (a writer to whom McCorkle is compared in reviews), who recently made headlines for the devastating fact that her daughter was sexually abused by Munro’s second husband. After later learning about the abuse, Munro stayed with him, never reconciling with her daughter. A fiction writer is always writing someone’s story. Of course, McCorkle wouldn’t have read about these events until after Old Crimes was written, and no other resemblance between the fictional and real-life characters exists. But I mention it here because in these stories, and in many by Munro, the crimes aren’t the focus but rather the failures to do what one knows is right.
In other words, sins of omission abound. “No mother should…” says Loris, and we realize her judgment is not of other women, but of herself. The three stories in which Loris appears reveal the whole course of her life: Her husband abuses her and her son. In one instance, she fails to believe her child’s account, which pits him against his father. Estranged from her son, she lives out her days carrying around his stuffed owl from childhood. With fiction’s unique interior access and its wide-angle lens, we see that self-deceptions, much as we may depend on them for survival, are always self-defeating.
In a recent New Yorker “Critics at Large” podcast, Alexandra Schwartz and other writers wrestle with the underside of literature’s ability to morally enable readers. Schwartz theorizes of Alice Munro: “[Her] literary intelligence enabled the tragedy in [her own] life to take place.” Munro’s stories lay bare the knottiness of moral wrongdoing. But focusing on this complexity may have “blinded” the writer, or least appeased her—allowing her to put her “insight in[to] language.” Perhaps Munro’s uncanny ability to portray a certain kind of woman, reckless and oppressed, incapable of doing the right thing, became a proxy for actually doing the right thing.
McCorkle’s characters often lack self-awareness. Loris is regretful but doesn’t fully comprehend the depth of her poor decisions. Throughout “Low Tones,” she repeatedly encounters reflections and distortions—in her shower door, mirrors, and water. These encounters reveal how difficult it is for her to discern between a person’s true self and their image. At the end of the story, she experiences a moment of clarity that suggests she may abandon her husband, but this hope is undone in another story, “Filling Station.” Loris stays with him through hospice, to his burial. She is assisted by a former student of his, who reveres Mr. Ward as a role model and father figure.
Reading these stories, I felt compassion: for Loris’s son, building a family far away; for others in the Wards’ orbit; even for Loris. But also for myself. I saw aspects of myself reflected in Loris, reminding me of the times I’ve projected onto others what I needed them to be. Recognition leads to compassion. Maybe this is what we need from literature, more than understanding.
When “Sparrow” opens, the community is reeling from the tragic plight of a mother who has died with her child by asphyxiation. This is not the only grim memory the town keeps alive. Fear lurks everywhere, in stories of a girl dying by overdose, a body found in the woods, a young boy who disappeared thirty years ago. And while McCorkle proves her skill at heightening tension—the series of mishaps on the baseball field are tautly rendered—the reader feels the safety of the sidelines filled with watchful parents. In the home the mother creates, as she “immersed [her] hands in that warm, sudsy water and stared into the dark woods,” we feel awash in maternal care.
“Sparrow” is as much about the universal wish to protect our children as it is about the false stories we tell ourselves and the faulty assumptions we make about others. McCorkle masterfully draws Lynn’s character. That this young mother is at once attracted to and repelled by Loris is conveyed to great effect. The earnest way we cling to what we make up about people, concocting their pasts without having the foggiest idea, is heartbreaking. We need stories. Neuroscience explains how we will invent a reason for any action, including our own, even when we don’t know the reason. But these inventions are almost always wrong. We understand only a fraction of each other. We can never truly know someone, only what she wishes to reveal, often inadvertently.
To read Old Crimes is to uncover the hidden hurts and private misdemeanors of many. In one story the women who meet regularly to discuss how they were duped by the same man are served wine by a daughter whose mother, in another story, focuses more on her doll collection than her grandchild. The connections demonstrate just how tangled together we are in this messy life. And the humor! Trust me, it rears up at regular intervals. Whoever saw me howling with laughter as I drove down I-95 might have passed me crying a few minutes later as I listened to “Act III.” In the story, a retired drama teacher reflects on the roles and theatrics at her family gathering, the last she’s likely to attend.
Lynn’s early narrative, and her quasi-premonition of a belt, hangs over the book from start to finish. It’s a fitting structure. Regrets and old wounds hang over many of us till death. To take in all these on the page is to witness what remains hidden in our daily lives. Again and again, McCorkle shows us a glimpse of another’s heart so that we can know our own—and maybe forgive both.
