Sweet Talk
Every morning we boarded the Army-green bus–the slime-green, dead-swamp-algae-green bus–and rode it to the post gate, past the concrete island where the MPs stood in their bulletproof booth. Across from the gate, we got off at a street corner and waited with the other Army kids, the junior-high and high-school kids, for the real bus, the yellow one with the civilian kids on it.
I first learned about Stephanie Vaughn’s stories on a recent New Yorker fiction podcast, when Tobias Wolff read the story “Dog Heaven.” Having Wolff vouch for a story should be enough–he’s the best American short story writer working today, and his reading skills are almost as wonderful as his writing. And that Vaughn’s story took place in the “Army brat” world where I grew up was even better. But what really drew me to this collection was the way Vaughn played with time and place in “Dog Heaven”: the narrative moves around nimbly and subtly, switching almost effortlessly from past to present to future and back, and in and out of the narrator’s head in very interesting ways. I had to read more.
Half the stories in Sweet Talk take place on Army bases, or in the aftermath of a life spent in the shadow of the military. They are quiet, elegiac reflections on rootlessness, honor, and living in the shadow of war; a military base is, ironically, one of the safest places to grow up, except for the specter of annihilation that lurks behind the white-washed exteriors. Aside from Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies, I’ve never seen this world described nearly as well as Vaughn does.
The other stories are contemporary “relationship” stories, but so much more. Like the Army stories, they are internal, and funny, and quietly moving. They explore the lies and compromises at the heart of relationships between friends, lovers, and spouses, but without bitterness. Almost thirty years after their publication, they still feel fresh and relevant.
