Alice Walker's latest collection of short stories opens with a long, non-fiction account of her 10-year marriage to a Jewish civil rights lawyer in 1960s Mississippi. Part letter, part appeal to memory, "To My Young Husband" charts the happiness and hopes of that early union, as well as its aftermath: that peculiar mix of intimacy and estrangement that lingers long after the dissolution of a marriage.
These 60 pages contain the story of their meeting, sketches of characters (both famous and nameless) who peopled their life, the description of a visit to a family therapist - years after their split and arranged by their adult daughter - and the difficulties Walker and her first husband encountered as an inter-racial couple. Of the attendance by white nurses at the birth of their daughter, Walker writes: "We were the nightmare their mothers had feared, the hidden delight generations of their fathers enjoyed. We were what they had been taught was an impossibility . . . "
All the fictional stories that follow are variations on the themes set forth in "To My Young Husband" - love, loss, interracial friendships and love affairs, bisexuality, familial ties broken and reforged. But the focal point is provided by Walker's stated project of recovery, not of the "illusory `safety` of skin colour, money or the 1950s," but of whatever was good and true and well-intentioned in the love she shared with this incongruous partner.
In setting herself this task, Walker hopes not only to heal the young wounded idealists they were, but also the "frightened, broken-hearted nation" that is America. In suggesting that those who've loved - rather than those who've killed - might forge the future, she posits the creation of a new "American race," and it is to this race of lovers that her latest book is dedicated. This emphasis on the particular, Walker explains, is necessary because healing the world does not take place in the abstract. Rather, "healing begins where the wound was made." Hence this collection's rather Oprah-esque title.
Unfortunately, this interesting point of departure is fleshed out in stories mostly mediocre, at times cloyingly schmaltzy (see "Cuddling"), at others irritatingly polemic. Individuals become mouthpieces for Walker's politics. A woman, while setting the table, "remembered Toni Cade Bambara's statement that Depression is Collaboration with the Enemy."
Walker's life is perhaps more interesting than her writing. A pagan, bisexual black woman who emerged from an impoverished Southern childhood to become a Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award Winner (for The Color Purple), a multi-million-selling author and a household name. In her memoir The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult she recounts, absorbingly enough, the bitter criticism to which she was subject following the publication and filming of The Color Purple (primarily because of the novel's depiction of black men), the effects of sudden success, and the undiagnosed Lyme disease that enervated her for three years.
But there again, she is capable of sounding mawkishly empowered: "For that great gift, that I am me: with this spirit, this hair, this fluid, whole sexuality, this vision and this heart, I dare not apologize." Even her novel about female genital mutilation in Africa, Possessing the Secret of Joy, is worthy and instructive rather than particularly well written.
Walker is undoubtedly a woman to admire; she has earned that now trite sobriquet: a survivor. Her political stances are laudable, as is her insistence on confronting issues of race, gender and violence. But her fiction seems engaged rather than engaging. In the epilogue to this collection, Walker returns to the direct address of her first husband in a piece built, strangely, around the death of John Kennedy Jr and her own grief at his passing. In this, as in the opening address, there is an immediacy, a wistfulness, and a sorrowful call to arms that make these book-end pieces worthwhile.
In a moving statement on the barefaced tragedy of simply living, she writes: "I imagine we are almost at the point of viewing the relentless approach of the Grim Reaper among those we love, coming ever closer to ourselves, as farce. We've wept so much. Up begins to rise in us something of the absurd." Walker is a writer capable of such elegant matter-of-factness, but in this latest offering she too often slips instead into cosy sentiment.
Molly McCloskey is the author of Solomon's Seal, a short story collection