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Dying Light and Other Stories by Donald Hays
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Donald Hays published a great baseball novel in
1984, The Dixie Association, followed by a somewhat less successful
novel, The Hangman’s Children, in 1989. After that he seemed to
disappear. I was disappointed; I hate to see talented writers go to ground
(like, where did Jonathan Valin go after so many good Harry Stoner novels?) But it seems Hays was just working on his game while teaching at the University of Arkansas, a school with a great English and writing program (to many people’s surprise). The result is a recently published collection of stories Dying Light, which is well worth the wait. Hays is in top form in these stories, all of which take place in and around Fayetteville (with the occasional road trip to Tulsa or Kansas City) and focus on the unwinding of lives as age and mistakes take their toll. These are not happy stories. The title, while ostensibly about the end of day, could also be thought of as “Dying Heavy” for his characters seem to be checking out with lingering terminal disease, divorce, unreconciled family rifts, and other sad results of living as best as one can in a world which is sometimes harsh. They may be ordinary people in the mid-South, but as a writing professor in one of the stories tells a student (with whom he is having an affair): “we tend to spend the early years of our adulthood categorizing people. After that, we begin noticing all the exceptions. Then we see that everyone is an exception.” Although this collection seems focused on the difficult in life, it is not without humor and uplifting empathy. It is good to have Hays back in print; his time off sharpened his eye, his writing, his wisdom. Watching him work the short story is like what one of his characters says about watching Maddox pitch:
For me, Hays’s well-written stories make a very
real difference. |
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