The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Islands, Women, and God by Paul RuffinAaron Gwyn
Paul Ruffin. Islands, Women, and God. Browder Springs, 2001. 237 pp. $24.95.
The title of Ruffin’s collection comes from the last story, a tale about a man who forsakes civilized life to inhabit islands near the Pascagoula River. Such a story fronts the collection’s unifying themes: solitude, the desire for a spirituality connected with landscape, and the belief that there is still something dignified and essential about masculinity. Far from falling into the misogynist traps that ensnare so many writers associated with a “Men’s Movement,” Ruffin’s fiction honestly explores the problems of the male gender. Islands, Women, and God shows us men who are ineffectual as husbands and fathers, men inept at their jobs, men whose racist tendencies endanger more than just their minds. In the opening story, a harrowing account of an escaped African American prisoner and those sent to apprehend him, the narrator is haunted by an ancient anecdote that threatens to dovetail with his current situation. Ruffin ends with an image that is less epiphany and more a vision of terror, one that will both infect and (potentially) immunize the protagonist, a man now compromised, yet wizened by the story he must tell. But it is, perhaps, in “Tattered Coat upon a Stick” that Ruffin strikes his purest note. The story is familiar enough: a man too old to take care of himself must rely on his daughter and sons. Yet gradually, Ruffin guides his Lear into new terrain: the tale soon becomes one of quest, and then of poignant abnegation. While we end with the death of the patriarch by his own hands, we are reluctant to call this act suicide, for there is something in its tenor and execution that strikes us as noble. As so often in this collection, the author leaves us in a space that is ambiguous, but by no means coy. [Aaron Gwyn]