It’s been four years since the unexpected passing of Brad Watson, from cardiac arrest at his home in Wyoming. One of the most gifted and underappreciated American fiction writers of the last half-century, Brad was a master of style and form, but he was also a terrific storyteller and just plain fun to read.
Inventive and unpredictable, Watson’s work covers the full spectrum of human experience, from comic absurdity to profound pathos and everything in between. He came of age as a writer evoking the tradition of his friends and mentors Barry Hannah and Larry Brown, eventually departing from the “Dirty South” territory and heading out for stranger, surreal, elegiac climes.
Calling a writer whose work consistently earned wide critical acclaim and major grants, prize nominations, and prizes galore “underappreciated” might seem illogical. But writers want readers. In his lifetime, Brad was a writer’s writer and a cult hero, which are not at all bad things to be, but he was not as widely read as he wished to be or should have been. Thanks to the efforts of Watson’s widow, Nell Hanley, and his editor Alane Salierno Mason, we now have an opportunity to correct that injustice: There is Happiness: New and Selected Stories, which is both a career retrospective anthology and a glimpse of the still-evolving aesthetic of a singular talent.
The collection is introduced by the great Joy Williams, Watson’s friend and one-time colleague at the University of Wyoming and a clear influence on his later work. Indeed, Watson’s later stories bear closer resemblance to Williams’ aesthetic and philosophy than the Southern literary heavyweights to whom Watson was often compared, at first accurately, later by default. Reading the new stories and rereading the old, I am struck by how purposefully and deliberately Watson had always been moving toward this territory. Though he was born and raised in Mississippi and is inevitably classified as a Southern writer, Watson’s work doesn’t really belong to any geographical region. His genre is the Sublime. Amid Watson’s dark humor, his surrealism, his casts of oddballs and outcasts, and his Gothic, sometimes ghoulish images and turns of plot lies the persistent question of how to live after one discovers — borrowing from Schopenhauer — “how hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses.”
“The next world(s) are always near in these stories,” Williams writes, “so unlike the visible here-and-now one where people just get ‘scattered carelessly into this life or that,’ and Watson enters them with unguarded joy.” In “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” a misbegotten revenge plot results in the titular zookeeper accidentally serving himself up as dinner to a leopard, who then departs for the nearest golf course. The pile of poop the big cat leaves on the fifth fairway, endowed with the “vestigial consciousness” of the zookeeper, experiences relief “at the sensation of (relative) light and air.” In “There is Happiness” — as deceptively titled a story as one is likely to encounter — a female serial killer on the lam carries on philosophical conversations about the nature of life and death with a wig stand adorned with grim trophies from her murder spree which she names Elizabeth Bob: “together they lived for a long while a contented and peaceful life, a life that seemed graced with unconditional love.”
These bizarre, sometimes comic, sometimes perverse reversals of the accepted rules of reality enhance the thematic resonance of Watson’s more straightforwardly realistic stories, in which flawed, broken people reckon with failure and search for — but rarely attain — grace, peace, enduring love, or contentment. Every one of the stories in There Is Happiness resonates, but my sentimental favorite is “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” the title story from Watson’s second collection, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, in which a teenaged couple thrust into early adulthood by an unplanned pregnancy are visited in their garage apartment by two people who claim to be aliens. The narrator assumes the intruders are merely escapees from a nearby mental institution, but after their departure, his reality bends into strange, hallucinatory space, evoking wit, pathos, and a desperate yearning that lingers long after the last sentence.
For readers new to Brad Watson’s work, There Is Happiness is a perfect introduction, a greatest hits album with a few unreleased singles which hint at the great work that was yet to come but for the cruelty of fate. For those of us who knew and loved Brad, it’s a bittersweet gift. In one older story (I won’t say which), a professor in Wyoming with a mutt dog and “a dark sense of humor [his] students seemed to like” dies of a heart attack. “Too soon,” I thought, recalling the shock and sorrow so many of us felt when the word about Brad began to circulate on that sad day in July 2020. But you didn’t need to know Brad to feel as if he knew you. That’s how it feels to read these stories: as if the writer knew and understood something about you, that he wrote the story so you could understand that something yourself. In the story I just mentioned, death is not the end for that character; it shouldn’t be the end of Brad Watson’s story either — nor, I suspect, will it be.
[Read Chapter 16‘s 2011 interview with Watson here and his remembrance of fellow author William Gay here. His 2016 novel, Miss Jane, is reviewed here.]
Ed Tarkington is the author of two novels, Only Love Can Break Your Heart (2016) and The Fortunate Ones (2020). He lives in Nashville.
Tagged: 2024 Southern Festival of Books, Book Reviews, Fiction
