Made for walking

Jill McCorkle's new collection of short stories, her first since 1998's "Final Vinyl Days," begins with the title story, about a heroine who is "a mythical stereotype" in a family myth that is "old, overused, and unoriginal, yet very much alive."

One could argue that all the heroines in this diamond-faceted work are stereotypes, recognizable since Homer made Penelope: women at all stages of protest and regret over life, love and loss.

But between stereotype and overused family myth lies a unique space, almost a parallel universe, able to be conjured only by consummately skilled literary masters. This is the space inhabited by "Going Away Shoes."

It is not just that McCorkle takes something old and makes it new -- it's that all her stories retain their originality while brimming with her moral imagination: new wine that makes old bottles stronger.

Debby Tyler is the aforementioned "mythical stereotype," the "oldest child who stays home to tend the sick and dying mother while her sisters marry and have prosperous lives elsewhere." The surface of the story is an elegy of lost time. But the heart is in the moments of miniature pathos that add up to more than 100 percent of Debby's anger and frustration: "Even now, Debby can stand in front of her mother's closet and glimpse her own life there. The soft, red calf-skin purse that brushed her cheek when she grabbed her mom around the waist and begged not to be left at Bible camp."

McCorkle enlarges the applicability of her characters to her readers' lives by de-emphasizing setting. There is the occasional reference to a Food Lion, or Calabash seafood, but this is not the (stereo)typical kudzu-laced, RC Cola-sweetened world of McCorkle's designated cubbyhole, Southern literature. This is a space between conventional spaces.

Tyler proclaims herself Sisyphus, the tortured ancient Greek sinner resigned to his fate in hell, and there is a sense in some of the stories of resignation even in protest. "PS" is the cathartic letter of a divorced woman to her marriage counselor, "Driving to the Moon" an extended meditation on a boyfriend loved but never truly had. "Midnight Clear" deals with "Christmas Eve -- our first in this new house, our first in our new family configuration -- a single mother and two young sons." "Intervention," named a best American short story in 2004, chronicles the process a wife goes through in deciding whether to disturb the decaying, peaceful life of her alcoholic husband.

But there are also stories that defy categorization, such as "Another Dimension," a violently graceful tale in which two children of a mother who dies young push away their trauma by watching horror movies: "Not long after their mother died, Ann and Jimmy saw 'Twilight Zone' episode where children who have lost their mother are able to pick parts to create a robotic grandmother" Jimmy, the normally implacable boy, is undone, however, when the TV children begin "sifting through what looked like marbles, picking the right eyes, searching for the most loving and motherly."

In McCorkle's Hades, there must be humor as well, exemplified best by the coda to the collection, "Me and Big Foot," in which a single and mostly happy woman escapes the well-meaning intentions of her matchmaker friends by inventing a romance-novel boyfriend out of a pickup truck, a pair of boots and a note asking her not to call the cops.

There is "Happy Accidents," about a woman obsessed with the late oil painter Bob Ross, who lives on in reruns, a "wonderful resurrection. Day after day, he springs back to life with the promise of something new. He's a lot like Jesus when you think about it -- the second chance, the promise of something better, the beard."

But to return to the haunting Debby Tyler: The caretaker of the mother with the baby-cow purse is also a freelance journalist who once wrote a travel piece about Washington, D.C., including in it the Holocaust Museum because "she could not stop thinking about that mountain of shoes. The orphaned objects held the memory of the person, arch to instep, leather molded to contours of flesh and bone. The click of those heels lost to time, coming home, going to work, meeting a lover on the outskirts of town."

McCorkle inhabits her characters the way those feet inhabited those shoes, uniquely, authentically, humanly.

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