‘Where the Light Falls’, selected stories by Nancy Hale (2019) – 347 pages

“It makes me riotously angry that such a brilliant and important writer as Nancy Hale could fall out of public consciousness.” – Lauren Groff

On the surface, it would appear that no two writers could be more different than the two writers whose selected short stories I have read recently, Anna Kavan and Nancy Hale. Kavan and Hale do have in common that they were both active writing from the mid-1930s until the late 1960s. However their lives and styles of writing are totally different.

Anna Kavan of course is known for her heroin addiction, her asylum incarcerations, and her numerous suicide attempts. Meanwhile Nancy Hale, if she is remembered at all, is remembered as an elegant stylist who had eighty stories appear in the New Yorker, and ten of her stories received the O Henry Prize for fiction. Whereas Kavan’s stories are choppy and blunt and often grotesque, Hale’s stories are more readily accessible, more expansive, more traditional, smoother, and more readable.

Kavan and Hale also do have in common that they were both born into money. Nancy Hale was born to an upper class family in Boston and after her third marriage relocated to Virginia. If you happen to have the misfortune of being born into a family with money, you are probably stuck with writing about rich people. Hale wrote about rich people which is even the title of one of her stories.

“Rich, they looked rich, irritated, fussy, with eyes bright as jewels; cynical, bored, unhappy.”

The well-to-do have their own set of problems. In Hale’s story “Sunday Lunch”, a young minister can sense through experience the emotional dynamics that are going on between the members of a family that he is visiting for lunch. The dynamics are not good. In her story “Crimson Autumn”, a college girl is in love with the star Harvard running back Davis, but finds herself thinking more and more about his best friend Richard.

I found all of the stories in this collection affecting, sharply observed, and enjoyable. Sure, these stories are not momentous or world shattering, but what’s wrong with something being entertaining and “merely pleasant”? You can always tell a good story collection when you are actually looking forward to reading the next story.

By the way, Nancy Hale’s life did have some turmoil. She had two failed marriages by her mid-thirties and also suffered a nervous breakdown and sought psychiatric treatment in a sanitarium. Later she would have a successful marriage that would last forty-five years.

The stories in ‘Where The Light Falls’ are steady and consistently interesting, not overwrought or excessive.

Grade:    A