[In the following review, Tandon argues that there are profound moments in Gilchrist's The Age of Miracles, but that it is not her best work.]

Ellen Gilchrist, as readers of her stories will have noticed, has a gift for moving meticulously around the textures and ramifications of an event; and while her novels are always entertaining, this is a gift which lends itself more naturally to the short story, a form where epiphany is distilled and compressed. The Age of Miracles is a welcome return to Gilchrist’s Southern landscapes and charmingly fallible characters.

Fables depend on a sense of ritual and expectation, and although only “Madison at 69th” openly calls itself “A Fable”, Gilchrist’s talent for noticing the shapes of habit in everyday life runs deep. In “Statue of Aphrodite”, the disappointment of Rhoda Manning, the author’s recurring heroine, is articulated through her clothes. She sets off to meet an unknown admirer with “a sophisticated black three-piece evening suite … and an even more sophisticated beige Donna Karan to wear on the plane”, and a bathetic weight sounds in the description of the Laura Ashley dress he sends her:

Its full skirt covered up the only thin part of my body. Its coy little neckline made my strong shoulders and arms look absurd. … I managed to look like a tennis player masquerading as a shepherdess.

Rhoda is one of a cast of characters who crop up repeatedly in Gilchrist’s work, and though she is someone we relish meeting again, her very ubiquity can be self-defeating, in that a few too many of the other characters and narrators share her taste for loping, paratactic sentences and worldly pronouncements: “Women and their desire to please wealthy, self-made men. Think about that sometime if you get stuck in traffic in the rain.” In general, however, the way in which stories and characters intertwine with and comment on each other is one of Gilchrist’s signal strengths.

On the simplest level, the overlaps deepen the imaginative reality of her fictional terrain, that Arkansas/Mississippi/Louisiana area which is becoming her answer to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. They also enable Gilchrist to display her tonal skill; like musical variations, individual stories can provide different perspectives on the same events. For example, a poet’s suicide can precipitate two stories as different as the bitter-sweet “Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria” [sic] and the comically petulant “Among the Mourners”. Where the former traces the impact of the suicide on New Orleans bohemia, the latter is easily the funniest story in the collection, as a female Holden Caulfield moans about her parents and the poet’s funeral:

Here’s what they do that drives me crazy. They preach all the time about reason. Dharma, my dad calls it. He is so big on dharma. Then the first something happens they start acting like these big Christians or something and having all these rituals.

The Age of Miracles is not Gilchrist’s best book; it doesn’t have the consistency of a work like Drunk with Love. However, there are in this new collection moments of more profound and graceful achievement than she has shown before. Most notable in this regard is the story which contains the book’s title, “Death Comes to a Hero”. In a tale which itself takes its cue from “A Painful Case” in Dubliners, a one-legged Joyce scholar, Morais Wheeler, discovers a soulmate in his aerobics class, only to find that the heart she has stirred is giving up on him. With its turns of phrase (“He wrapped a smile around her embarrassment”) and its control of tone, this story of love among the Stairmasters is Gilchrist at her most effective.

Although the book has its fair share of dramatic climaxes, such as Wheeler’s heart-attack or the bomb that kills Rhoda’s acquaintance in “Paris”, Gilchrist is less interested in sweeping revelations than were earlier writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner. In her world, people’s plans tend to go awry less obviously, if no less painfully, collapsing in slow motion like ice in spring. The “miracles” in this book are quiet surprises, as when in “Madison at 69th”, a woman’s children persuade her that she doesn’t need a facelift—by kidnapping her and slipping her a mickey. Ellen Gilchrist has an ear for the equivocal, as her titles suggest: Drunk with Love, Net of Jewels, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. And in her best work, she displays a sensitivity which comprehends its own cost. One view of freedom:

Not a membrane to separate him from all that burgeoning wonder, all the glorious and inglorious knowledge of our being.

measures against another:

They are free, in the deepest and most terrible sense of the word. Cut loose, dismounted, disengaged.

If nothing else, Gilchrist is one of our more intriguing examiners of the pavement on the road to hell.