ISLAND FOG
by John
Vanderslice
STORIES OF
NANTUCKET THEN AND NOW
Lavender Ink
Press (October 2014)
There
is an uncommon power to this collection, which feels a good deal more potent
than the sum of its parts. Vanderslice's Nantucket is -- like Spoon River or
Winesburg or Yoknapatawpha -- a remarkable place.” —Philip
Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Nantucket then and now
is the theme of John Vanderslice’s novel-length collection of stories, called
“a chilling tour-de force worthy of a Chesterton or a Borges.” The stories all
take place on that iconic Massachusetts island, which began as an English
settlement early in the colonial period of the United States. In the heyday of
its nineteenth century success as a whaling center, the island was quite the
cosmopolitan center. Sailors from across the globe mingled with the mixed
local population of descendants of the original English settlers, black
Americans, and native Americans. Today Nantucket is known as being
especially open to visitors from around the world. When one travels there, one
feels that one is no longer in the United States but in a culturally
indistinct, in-between land, somehow equidistant from North America, the
Caribbean, and Northern Europe.
Vanderslice’s
collection spans a period of Nantucket history from 1795 to 2005, with four
different centuries represented. Two of the stories--the first and last in the
book--are novellas. Along the way, readers meet: an 18th century wigmaker
accused of a notorious bank robbery, a 19th century "whaling widow"
who has newly awakened to some important aspects of her sexual nature, a former
whale ship captain who once had to resort to cannibalism to survive an extended
period at sea after being shipwrecked, a 20th century plumber whose wife jumped
off the Hyannis to Nantucket ferry with her infant child in her arms, and a 21st
century ghost tour leader who is being metaphorically haunted by a former
lover.
PEOPLE
ARE TALKING ABOUT ISLAND FOG
John Vanderslice teaches writing in the
master of fine arts program at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway,
where he's also one of the editors of Toad Suck Review. His new book Island
Fog (Lavender Ink, $17.95), a collection of thematically connected short
stories set on Nantucket Island, deserves more space and consideration than I
can provide here, but the alternative would be to ignore a worthy, haunting
book.
The first half ("King Philip's
War") is composed of stories that take place from 1795 to 1920, while the
second ("Island Fog") is made of more contemporary pieces, set mostly
in the 2000s.
It's the historical-feeling fiction of the
first half that affected me deepest. The first story, "Guilty Look,"
considers an actual bank robbery that took place on the island in 1795 and
establishes a tone of apartness from the rest of America that carries through
to the final pages. I haven't been to Nantucket as an adult, so I can't vouch
for the accuracy of this vision of the island as a kind of gray-market American
frontier, but Vanderslice's characters are credibly human and humane. The
opening story that unfolds of the unjustly accused William Pease -- a
Congregationalist suspected of abetting the robbery by an opportunistic Quaker
oligarch -- might resonate with those who worry about the slide toward
theocracy.
In "On Cherry Street," set in
1837, a woman whose seafaring husband hasn't been heard from in three years
declares herself a widow and finds controversy and recompense in the decision.
A little later on, we meet a retired sea captain who has, of necessity,
acquired a shamefully exotic taste. (A rare but not exactly unknown preference,
if we're to believe Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket or Benjamin Morrell's possibly dubious 1832 memoir Narrative
of Four Voyages.)
In the second half, Nantucket has been
reduced from a nation-state to a tourist trap and playground for the rich, a
place where ghosts are still palpable and certain American resentments have
taken root. The titular final story, of novella length, flirts with magical
realism as its protagonist Doug, having flunked out of the University of
Massachusetts, repairs to the island for a summer job, his "future draped
before him like an island fog: dank, listless and inscrutable."
You might come to this collection thinking
it a specialty work made up of little stories that appeared in little
magazines. But there is an uncommon power to this collection, which feels a
good deal more potent than the sum of its parts. Vanderslice's Nantucket is --
like Spoon River or Winesburg or Yoknapatawpha -- a remarkable place.
—Philip
Martin, Arkansas Democrat Gazette
This island feels like some mad doctor’s lab experiment”—so
says one of the fictional residents of Nantucket Island, the setting of John
Vanderslice’s extraordinary story collection Island Fog. But Vanderslice
is by no means a mad doctor, though he is definitely one insanely talented writer.
In the eleven literary experiments that comprise his book, he brilliantly
parses the soul of America from 1795 to 2005 through the microcosm of Nantucket
Island. To borrow the words of yet another of his characters, he conveys
“the awful weight of history pressing down upon the island” and conveys it so
viscerally that we feel that “time has stopped or has circled around on itself”
and we are “back inside that living spiraling body, that awful protean force”
that was, and is, not just the island but America. This is a book that
anyone interested in the grand, failed experiment that is America should read.
It will open your eyes, and your heart.
—David Jauss, author of Glossolalia and Black
Maps
John Vanderslice’s debut collection is a whopping cycle of
beautifully crafted stories spanning over two hundred years of Nantucket
history, each emerging from the fog of the past crystal clear, complete, and
poignant. Reading Vanderslice’s stories, it’s as if Ishmael has never boarded
the whaleship Pequod in Nantucket, as if he’s remained
island-bound to tell these far-reaching, masterful tales. In a gripping,
surreal novella reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, Vanderslice
opens the collection in 1795, during which a consortium of religious oligarchs
use a bank robbery as a kind of witch hunt to consolidate power. In “King
Philip’s War,” the narrator challenges a Native American boy in a footrace
whose outcome is more onerous than he can imagine. From the travails of whaling
widows, to a ship’s Captain who must resort to cannibalism to survive on the
high seas, to an African-American school teacher stalked by her students, we
see Nantucket’s earliest European and native inhabitants struggling to find a
place in this island community. In part two of the collection, beginning in
1999, Nantucket transforms from a site of colonization and industrial whaling
to a tourist town, dead and haunted in its off-seasons, a crossroads for people
running from others, and from themselves. A carpenter struggles with a “fog of
soporific recollections” at the death of his wife and child. A man flees
a love affair in Boston to establish a company giving ghost tours, only to be
haunted himself. Jamaican immigrants find veiled resentment. The titular
novella bookends this richly realized collection. In it, a young man flunking
out of U Mass finds himself on a purgatorial visit to Nantucket, where he is
hired to participate as an actor in “Hopes and Promises” tableaus that reenact
customers’ past moments of deepest desires and regrets. Read this book! Rarely
have I enjoyed a story collection with such artistic and historical sweep, one
so quintessentially and vibrantly American.
—Wendell Mayo, author of The Cucumber King of
Kedainiai: Fictions
John Vanderslice's Island Fog is far more than just a
collection of stories. Tied together by a place and its history, the collection
tells the story of Nantucket Island through the desperate lives and conflicts,
hopes and sorrows of its inhabitants. I began reading the collection assuming
it was for folks who have known or loved Nantucket and by the third story I was
convinced that Island Fog is for anyone who loves good stories, beautifully
told, with a good slice of the twisted history of humanity thrown in.
—Robert Hicks, author of The Widow of the South
and A Separate Country
In this quirky yet captivating collection of nine stories and
two novellas, all set on Nantucket, the island is both microcosm and prism,
through which the reader catches illuminated glimpses of American life, from
the hard, dangerous times of the whaling community to the present-day tony
resort of the super-wealthy—and yet the same problems beset the inhabitants
through the centuries: racism, class exploitation, sexual identity, envy and
fidelity. The essence of all the fictions is “the awful weight of history
pressing down upon the island”, and in a twenty-first century America
struggling to reconstruct its identity, the reader cannot but hope that the
idyllic and mythic island might give us a clue about who we are. And yet in the
final novella, “Island Fog”, a chilling tour-de-force worthy of Chesterton or
Borges, we find ourselves in a place so far from reality that, like its hapless
and trapped protagonist, we wonder if we are doomed to play parts in someone
else’s fantasies forever. John Vanderslice is a writer of vision and this is a
haunting, essential collection.
—Garry Craig Powell, author of Stoning the Devil
ABOUT
JOHN VANDERSLICE
John Vanderslice hails from southern Maryland, specifically
the eccentric community of Moyaone. After twelve years of Catholic schooling,
and too many summers working as a lifeguard, he left the southern Maryland
woods to attend the University of Virginia. In 1991, he received his MFA in the
Poetry Writing program at George Mason University, where he studied under Peter
Klappert, William Matthews, and Susan Tichy and started teaching writing to
college freshmen at GMU and Northern Virginia Community College-Annandale.
In 1993, he entered the Ph.D program in the English Department at the
University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is now an Associate Professor in the
Department of Writing at UCA, teaching fiction writing, poetry writing, and
nonfiction writing both to undergraduates and to graduate students in the new
Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. He also serves as associate editor
of Toad Suck Review magazine.
More than eighty of his stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have
appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Seattle Review, Versal, Sou’wester, Laurel Review, Crazyhorse,
The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, 1966,
Squalorly, Foliate Oak, Red Wheelbarrow,
and Exquisite Corpse. Some of the
anthologies are Redacted Story, Chick for a Day, The Best of the First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006, and Tartts: Incisive Fiction from Emerging
Writers.
