Question

Write a short story on truth is sometimes stranger than fiction

Answer 1

A writer of many gifts and man of many foibles, J. F. Powers possessed an indelible voice, an unerring ear, a quintessentially American sense of independence, and a gnarly Irish Catholic fatalism. In "Look How the Fish Live," his 1975 story about a petulant father called on by his importuning children to save a doomed bird, Powers' protagonist ponders the seemingly random cruelty of nature. What explanation could there be for the pervasive violence and waste present, absurdly, even in the most domesticated suburban back yard? What or who was responsible? It can only be God, the father concludes. Powers allows him to ruminate further: "It wasn't surprising, for all problems were at bottom theological. He'd like to put a few questions to God. God, though, knowing his thoughts, knew his questions, and the world was already in possession of all the answers that would be forthcoming from God."

Powers had a reputation for irascibility, and that reputation is richly confirmed by the correspondence collected in Suitable Accommodations. There is as much growl in his writing as there is wit, and there is a surfeit of that. A short-story writer of brilliance, he was admired by several generations of readers—especially Catholics, for he wrote almost exclusively about Catholic priests. Powers staked out the everyday conflicts and absurdities of rectory and parish life in the Midwest (mostly Minnesota) in the way Faulkner annexed Yoknapatawpha County or Woody Allen the Upper East Side. He knew the territory, and he knew how to turn the ephemeral nature of experience into something more lasting. Writing to a friend who had detected herself in one of his stories, Powers explained how fiction gets written. "You were and were not in it," he wrote. "The requirements of art demand that you do violence sometimes to the facts as they took place, or interpret them differently, or make up incidents and conjure up characters that life itself, being such an erratic artist, seldom provides."

The editor of this volume, Katherine Powers, is the writer's daughter, and her introduction and afterword make clear that she has inherited a large measure both of her father's exacting and unsentimental eye and of his elegance as a writer. In putting together this selection, her stated ambition was to create from the letters a kind of substitute for the novel of domestic travail her father was always threatening to write. Much of the energy and material for that novel, she suggests, was poured into letters to "Jim's" many devoted friends, some of them familiar names (Abigail and Eugene McCarthy, Theodore Roethke) but most not. Powers was involved, if tangentially, with several obscure radical Catholic social movements, including the Liturgical and the Catholic Rural Life movements as well as a group calling itself the Detachers. Educated by Franciscans, he was drawn to the idea of voluntary poverty, although—as he would be the first to admit—this probably had as much to do with laziness as with anticipation of the Parousia.

Needless to say, it is the rare collection of letters that a novel makes, and Suitable Accommodations, while surely of great interest to Powers fans, is often mundane, repetitious, and guarded in its revelations. Little narrative momentum builds in what is essentially a series of routine, if amusing, dispatches about routine matters, with only occasional references to the craft of writing itself. One longs to hear back from Powers' correspondents, whether his wife, or Robert Lowell, Evelyn Waugh, or his early editor Charles Shattuck, or from Harvey Egan, a priest, financial mainstay, and Powers' most frequent correspondent.