Until his 2014 retirement, David Jauss was best known locally as a much beloved and highly influential creative writing professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the author of the superlative handbook On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing (Writer's Digest Book, $14.99).
But Jauss -- who still teaches in the low residency, high intensity MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier -- has a national reputation as one of the country's finest crafters of short fiction. He has written stories that have won Pushcart Prizes and O. Henry Awards. He's a regular in the little magazines, with a calm, dark voice that at times puts me in mind of Anton Chekhov. He is one of our very best short story writers, master of a compressive sans serif style that plays as plainsong. He has a knack for freighted detail and apparently a deep and abiding curiosity about the lives of others.
But to call him a "writer's writer" would suggest a higher level of difficulty than the work itself commands. Jauss has a rare empathy that allows him to convincingly enter the minds of characters who seem very much unlike the writer who imagined them. It's a bit unsettling to encounter Jauss after reading -- to take an example from my own bedside -- someone like Jay McInerney, whose mimicry of F. Scott Fitzgerald and allusiveness to his own (presumably well-known) history and image are part of the fun. Jauss is a drier, more subtle read whose sentences resolve rather than crackle and pop. His work is best appreciated in the middle distance, a step or two back from granular inspection. He doesn't dazzle you with pyrotechnic riffs. Every sentence Jauss writes is in service of the story.
His mastery is on full display in his latest collection Nice People: New & Selected Stories II (Press 53, $19.95). While there's nothing overtly difficult or showy about these stories, they all resound emotionally, with complex overtones of tragedy and grim humor.
Jauss is able to get out of the way of his own stories. He's an invisible animator, the sort of creator mind in which it's possible to disbelieve. You don't mark the author's cleverness while reading these stories of more or less ordinary people behaving in more or less explicable ways. "Nice People" is about a lawyer who cheats on his wife with his law partner and his inevitable estrangement from the life he had before; "Brutality" is a tender examination of our capacity for cruelty; "Providence" is about the careless moment perpetually regretted. And they all come to us in the plain language of those who imagine themselves decent or cursed.
Having erased the writer's tracks, Jauss allows us the illusion of following free-willed characters negotiating a universe of cool terror.
Nice People contains 13 stories. "Brutality," "Firelight" and "The Late Man" all share titles and themes with stories published in Jauss' 1996 collection Black Maps. A version of "Last Rites" was published in the 1984 collection Crimes of Passion.
Jauss is a restless writer, always revising, moving ever closer to perfection. With Nice People, he has just about arrived there.
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Local books always present us with a dilemma. Our criteria for choosing titles for this column includes anticipated reader interest (as well as your correspondent's interest). But sometimes it's better just to disclose stuff. So all right: Sally Nixon's picture book Houseplants and Hot Sauce: A Seek-and-Find Book for Grown-Ups (Chronicle Books, $14.95) is a wonderful, witty coffee table curio that would be worth noting even if our three terriers didn't know the author as "Aunt Sally," the dogs' caretaker for years when we were out of town.
Nixon's illustrations, which have been featured in Arkansas Life, are marvelously matter-of-fact portrayals of (mainly) young women captured in unselfconsciously mundane moments. Hot Sauce follows one of Nixon's atypically typical heroines through an ordinary yet eventful weekend and invites the looker to -- Where's Waldo-style -- pick out certain salient (or trivial) details. (I'm still looking for a certain Frisbee.)
And just because Et Alia Press published my last book -- and will likely publish my next one -- that's not a reason to ignore its Home Sweet Home ($24.95), which combines photos by Whitney Bower with text by Grace Vest to tell the stories of a couple dozen Arkansas rescued dogs.
For more information, go to homesweethomearpup.org.
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Style on 10/15/2017