Lost in the City

This collection, first published in 1992, was considered Jones's first literary effort. I find this idea of firsts interesting and would like to look at it briefly before I move on to a few of the craft elements in his stories that I would most like to steal. This collection of short stories was published a decade before Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World." Some of the stories in the collection were first published in the 1980s in literary magazines like Ploughshares and Callaloo. One of the stories "Marie" also appeared in the Paris Review in 1992. The thing that I find interesting is that these publications do not seem to register with the general public or even reviewers. Instead, his books are presented as sudden, award winning events. Instead of a writing career spanning 25 years of craft and respectable publications, we are presented with the image of a of sudden event, a spectacular storm, a writer whose first novel won the Pulitzer Prize. In any event, the first thing I did when I opened "Lost in the City" was to read the opening lines of each story. I wanted to see how and where he began his stories. I was thinking of an essay by Debra Spark called "Getting In and Getting Out." The essay appears in "Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life." There is an anecdote in the essay about a friend the author who is screening stories for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. She says, "If I have to read another story that begins `The alarm clock rang,' I'll shoot myself." Although I have never started a story with this particular phrase, I do tend to begin a story at the beginning. So as I read through the Jones collection I paid particular attention to the places he began his stories. In "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," Jones begins the narrative at some undefined future moment when the crisis of the story has already forced the characters' world to change. "Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone through the kitchen window...." The story never travels completely forward into the world from which these first lines are described. However, the story does end with a certain inevitability--a sort of narrative arc that points forward so that we understand how the characters arrive to the point we find them in the opening of the story. "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" covers a lot of ground in twenty-five pages. It outlines the decay of a Black, D.C. neighborhood and shows us how that decay affects the community. On one level it is a story about a father's coming to fatherhood as well as his young daughter's coming of age. It is about the place and the power of the natural world even in the urban environment. It is about an urban Black community on the edge of change. The narrative is carried along by the story of the young girl and her pigeons. The story is usually told through a close third person narrator; however, the point of vie

This is one of the best books and best short story collections I have ever read. Jones is so in command of his craft, it is eerie. He is like Iceman in Top Gun, he simply doesn't make false moves or mistakes. He is always in control. He writes in a spare prose but will then sneak up with beautiful imagery and word play. I am an avid reader and so I am even more impressed by this collection. The range of characters ages is wonderful, the sequencing is brilliant, and all the stories were strong, a rarity.

Jones is a very gifted writer; his characters are so believable and real. These are not the happiest of stories, but the quality of his writing is extraordinary. The two stories that stood out for me were "Orange Line to Ballston" and "Marie." Marie is an elderly woman who has outlived three husbands and must deal with the indignity of going for interviews at the Social Security office to be sitting there for hours on end long past the time for her appointment and treated as if she were invisible. Poignant and beautiful portrait of old age.

I have a strange suspicion that I would not have read Lost in the City if Edward P. Jones had not won the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World. And I think that would have been a big, big mistake. This is an excellent collection of short stories, even for someone who doesn't really know a thing about Washington, D.C. or the people who live there. The stories aren't short stories in the most traditional sense - they don't end with surprising or inevitable events or revelations. But each and every glimpse into the lives of these characters is interesting, thoughtful, and specific. Jones manages to paint a colorful, human, and memorable picture of the lives of each of the characters he introduces. Perhaps the most arresting part of his the stories, for me, is the language. There are so many passages that I will remember, but I will only share a few. In the story "Young Lions," a character named Caesar says to his girlfriend that he loves her: "I'm glad you told me," she said. "I was beginning to wonder. You made my day." He promised to fix her dinner before to went to Manny's and he told her once again that he loved her. "I wish I could record that," she said, "and play it back any time I wanted." These lines alone told me so, so much about the girlfriend, Carol, and I know that I won't forget her. Later, a character in a story called "The Sunday Following Mother's Day" notes that her father "sounded like every black country person she had ever heard, those people who talked of fetchin this and wearin britches and someone commencin to do such and such." I laughed out loud, because I, too, know some of these country people, and Jones's description is perfect. In the last story, "Marie," Jones write that Marie "was eighty-six years old, and had learned that life was all chaos and painful uncertainty and that the only way to get through it was to expect to chaos even in the most innocent of moments. Offer a crust of bread to a sick bird and you often drew back a bloody finger." Another delightful aspect of the book is that characters don't disappear at the end of a story. The two teenage girls who appear briefly in "The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed," pregnant and moving in together, show up again as adults with 20-year old sons in "His Mother's House." Two other characters in "Rhonda Ferguson" also appear in their own story in "A Butterfly on F Street." There are a few other characters who appear twice, and I believe that several minor characters in this collection will appear in Jones's next short story collection, which should be published this year. (One of the stories was already published in the New Yorker.) I can't wait to read them all.

This book of stories is one of the treasures of the 1990's, and it's a sad commentary that it is out of print. Jones hasn't helped himself by not publishing a follow-up, but Lost in the City is good enough to stand on its own. If you can find it second hand, buy it.