Neil Serven

Brad Watson died in 2020 at the age of 64, the same age as one of my favorite short story writers, Frederick Busch. I hadn’t really known Watson’s work at the time, but other writers celebrated both his stories and the human who wrote them. He wrote two novels, Miss Jane and The Heaven of Mercury (the latter a finalist for the National Book Award), and two collections, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. I was never able to find them in any bookstore I visited.

There’s now a posthumous collection available, There Is Happiness, published by W. W. Norton & Co., with a foreword by Joy Williams. It contains both of the title stories from Last Days and Aliens. Many of the stories have a Southern flavor (Watson was born in Mississippi) but are not as yarny as Barry Hannah’s or sentimental as Truman Capote’s; they are often humorous but not reductively so, weighted with sincerity even as they veer into the strange. Characters wear their flaws and get bruised from fights and embarrassment but persist in their efforts to strive upward. Just as with any Joy Williams collection, there are a good number of dogs, some with quirkier personalities than their humans, such as the dog in “Terrible Argument,” who is an unwilling witness to the combative relationship between a nameless couple. The dog gradually becomes the story’s motor:

The man and woman came by one day and took her home, and were kind to her, but almost immediately the daily loud barking and snarling started up, and even if she could usually tell when it was about to start she was always frightened and wanted to run away. Now here she was beneath the coffee table, licking her paws, with their leash fastened to the collar about her neck, and nowhere to go. No walk. No drive up into the mountains to chase squirrels. No quick trip to the prairie to jump jackrabbits, harass the cowardly pronghorn herd. She could rip open the back screen, jump the fence, and walk until another man or woman or couple saw the leash and took it up. She could offer herself to someone else this way, take her chances.

Williams was good friends with Watson, and after his death she wrote about driving up to his Wyoming ranch to mourn with his wife, Nell. Around this same time, I got to see a video recording of Watson giving an incredible lecture at Bread Loaf that discusses a story by Williams, “The Farm,” as an example of  a writer using craft as a way to unlock potentialities and recognize a story’s natural force.

Maybe the reason I had trouble finding his books is that I live too far north. But I was glad that There Is Happiness gave me a chance to experience the work of this thoughtful writer.

Tagged: books, fiction