"Anyway" by Mary Rickert: An Appreciation by Rick Bowes

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to read the manuscript of an amazing Mary Rickert novel. I didn't think the book was a word too long, in fact I wouldn't have minded at all if it had been longer. The cast of characters was large - it seemed to encompass most of the population of an upstate New York town - and the tightly wound plot spiraled hypnotically in ever-wider and wilder circles before it snapped shut.

"Anyway" has an entirely different tone. The words have a different rhythm. And this is a story of less than seven thousand words. But at the end, the trap again snaps and the shock is profound.

This short story has remarkable scope. It deals with Alzheimer's and young people bound for combat, with salvation and magic and the tangled love and anger of a family. The characters are rounded and multi-faceted. A man whose over-fond reminiscences of war lead his grandson to enlist in the marines has himself never been able to recover from the brutal murder of his son. The young recruit is a bright and sensitive kid.

The old man's daughter, the marine's mother is our narrator. At story's start she is in the midst of a mundane life, visiting her mother in a nursing home, musing on the paradox of being a vegetarian who has to buy pot roast for a birthday dinner. By story's end and without a false step on the author's part the narrator has become a terrifying figure with a human life and all of human life in her hands.

Mary Rickert is a remarkable new writer. This story will be among the wonders in her first book, the fiction collection Map of Dreams, due from Golden Gryphon in October 2006.

Link to story.