The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Big As Life: Three Tales of Spring by Maureen HowardBrian Evenson
Maureen Howard. Big As Life: Three Tales of Spring. Viking, 2001. 225 pp. $23.95.
Big As Life is the second book in Maureen Howard’s projected tetralogy about the seasons, the first of which was 1998’s A Lover’s Almanac. Big as Life is composed of three novellas. Howard, like William Trevor, sometimes writes in a style that initially seems at the heart of convention. However, both she and Trevor possess a subtlety and a brilliance, an interest in the nature of narrative and narrative structure, which make their best work anything but traditional. In "Children with Matches" Howard begins with the meditations of an old man approaching death, then quickly moves to one of his descendants as she reflects in the old man’s ruined house, hoping (and failing) to bring an element of fairy tale into her life. "The Magdalene" moves back and forth between two cousins-one cousin’s narrative in first person, the other in third-covering the effect that their brief early relationship seems to have had on their lives as a whole. The final novella, "Big As Life" is divided into three largely unrelated parts that nonetheless inform one another and build to a larger whole. In the first, we see naturalist John James Audubon’s wife Lucy abandoned while Audubon tries to forward his artistic concerns. The second depicts a mathematician’s journeys back and forth between a harrowing summer workshop and his lover, a painter. The final short section presents an unnamed contemporary narrator’s history of her relationship with the natural world. Combining elegant and cunning writing with a reconsideration of how stories can be pieced together, Big As Life is a strong text, with each novella having the impact of a larger novel. Howard is able to do three times in one book what it usually takes most writers an entire novel to accomplish not half so well. [Brian Evenson]