Kristin Scott

Dorothy Allison's "Trash" is like an old-fashioned, gritty, down-home Southern meal. The meat of raw experience is the main course, and every morsel is rich with flavor. Allison has a few bones to pick, and she doesn't sugarcoat what it's like to grow up as a poverty-stricken, "white trash," blue-collar lesbian in the South, back in the days of eight-track cassette players and scratchy albums.

In a fifteen-course short-story stew that boils over with rage, loss, shame, and hunger, these combined tales are also a recipe for emancipation, forgiveness, love, and reclaiming one's power. Allison gets right up in your face and dishes out everything from crude humor to well-cooked, simmering pain, as she chronicles the life of an unnamed narrator making her way through her rural Southern existence, pulling the reader along with her into back-alley bars, sweet-smelling kitchens, and highly-spiced bedrooms.

One of the main themes peppered throughout the book is that of loss and an inability to get what you want or hold on to it once you've got it, like in a "River of Names," where each name, each person lost to some tragedy, is like a fleeting drop of water in a rushing river that threatens to drown the narrator at any moment. And even though the narrator is able to keep her head above the flood, she is most threatened by her continued existence, " `Why me and not her, not him?' There is such mystery in it, and I have hated myself as much as I have loved others, hated the simple fact of my own survival."

The substance of these stories is a lot to chew on, can be hard to digest, and often leaves a bitter aftertaste, so read slowly. But Allison's smooth blend of languid Southern dialect without the "lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense" is indeed something to savor.

Trash, A Collection of Short Stories

By Dorothy Allison

Plume, $13, 219 pages

Dorothy Allison will read from "Trash" at Women and Children First, 5233 North Clark, (773)769-9299, on October 30 at 7:30pm

(2002-10-23)

Also by Kristin Scott

The greatest story never told
In a humanizing story of biblical proportions, Shlomo DuNour delivers a strange, critical, yet sympathetic take on the saga of mankind's creation through the eyes of a naïve and inquisitive angel named Adiel.
(2002-09-04)

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