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Jul
20
Book Review: Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published May 2010 by Graywolf Press
You don’t have to read much of Belle Boggs’s short story collection Mattaponi Queen to figure out why it won the Bakeless Prize in 2009. In fact, you don’t have to read beyond the preface, in which the illustrious Percival Everett, who selected Bogg’s work as the fiction winner, writes:
The stories are good because they are strongly imagined, finely controlled, and well-crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that only good fiction can be.
Of course, after a statement like that, you’ll want to keep reading, and you won’t regret it.
Mattaponi Queen is comprised of twelve stories set primarily in and around King William County, Virginia (not a far piece up the road from where I live in Richmond) and on the Mattaponi Indian reservation. Boggs’s stories vary in length (three pages to more than thirty), theme, characterization, and tone, defying the one-trick-pony problem that often plagues collections of short fiction, and they are unified by consistently fantastic writing that is, as Mr. Everett stated, “finely controlled…and well-crafted.” It is obvious that Boggs chooses her words carefully, and she makes every last one matter.
Mattaponi Queen is chock full of beautiful phrases, as when, in the opening story “Deer Season,” Boggs describes a deer standing unnoticed outside a school and says, “long dry fronds brush against its limbs and it holds still as a gasp.”
Still as a gasp. That’s good stuff.
Boggs’s characters live middle-class lives and grapple with the tension between their big dreams and the feeling that their lives are moving toward a certain inevitable, disappointing outcome. In “Good News for a Hard Time,” a young woman named Ronnie, who grew up on the reservation but left for art school (and then dropped out), reflects:
Almost three years out, Ronnie knew that she didn’t care as much as she hoped she would about art. She wasn’t going to New York; she wasn’t going to L.A. She got married in her dad’s backyard to a boy she knew in high school, and now she was going to have his baby, a soldier’s baby, probably in the county she’d grown up in. Probably on an Indian reservation that advertised on its weathered sign: Stone Age Relics: 1,000 years old!
In the same story, we meet Skinny, a friend of Ronnie’s father, who appears in several stories throughout the book. And that’s one of the things that makes this collection shine: Boggs presents characters more than once and from multiple perspectives.
We first meet Mrs. Cutie Young in the story “Imperial Chrysanthemum” when her nurse Loretta describes her:
I do not know why Cutie Young has a nurse, or why, for that matter, people call her Cutie. She’s mean and stubborn and takes a long time in the toilet, but other than that there’s nothing much wrong with her.
Cutie pops up again in “Election Day,” when we learn that she votes (and by votes, I mean that she writes herself in) not out of a sense of civic duty but because “she knows that whether you voted, though not for whom, is a matter of public record, and she has a private horror of being discovered to have missed an election,” and we see Loretta again in the title story “Mattaponi Queen.”
“Buckets of Rain” explores the challenges of being a child with an alcoholic parent and coping with being asked to do more and be more grown-up than one should have to be, and “Homecoming” examines the ways in which a second chance isn’t always a guarantee for change.
All of the pieces in Mattaponi Queen are wonderful, and each is remarkable in its own way, but the one I loved with a capital L was “Jonas,” in which Melinda, a middle-aged cheerleading coach, discovers that she is actually quite relieved when her husband announces that he wants to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Boggs’s treatment of a difficult and often controversial topic is sensitive and sympathetic, and her characters’ responses to the announcement are pleasantly surprising in their refusal to capitulate to stereotypes about small town folk.
Though Melinda wishes she had the answer to the question “How old do you have to be to understand how love works?” she is “used to taking things as they come.” While visiting a museum display of Fabergé eggs:
What Melinda liked best, she decided, was the idea of the surprise inside the egg, something special and hidden and fine, something to make you catch your breath.
Mattaponi Queen is filled with moments like this, quiet revelations, both explicit and implied, that shape and re-shape the reader’s experience of characters whose understandings of their lives are, like Cutie Young, “delicate in [their] moods” and always changing. We’re all always changing, and Belle Boggs’s ability to capture that in snapshot vignettes and traditional stories makes this collection immensely recommendable.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by RichRennicks and Rebecca Schinsky, Rebecca Schinsky. Rebecca Schinsky said: Book Review: MATTAPONI QUEEN by Belle Boggs http://bit.ly/9OrKuY (thanks, @graywolfpress) [...]
My love affair with short stories is a recent thing, but some do it better than others. I love it when characters pop in and out of stories! I feel that Jhumpa Lahiri is also very efficient with words. So much communicated with so little.
Sandy´s last [type] ..The Monster of Florence – Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi
Fantastic review! This book will go on my TBR list right away. Thanks.
Short stories are such a difficult genre, so I have an intense admiration for anyone who does them well. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for this one….I do love me some good short stories!
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[...] Book Review: Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs [...]
I just spotted a great review of this in the new Poets & Writers mag; it really does sound like a gem. Intriguing.
[...] last year and there are two that need to be on my list. The first, a short story collection called Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs is set in the south and feature fantastic writing, a strong sense of place, and are [...]