"All Aunt Hagar's Children": The other side of the other Washington

"All Aunt Hagar's Children"
by Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 399 pp., $25.95

For some novelists, short-story collections are stopgap affairs, a gathering of interim work they did while readying themselves for projects more ambitious.

That isn't the case with Edward P. Jones.

Before he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Known World" — his novel about black slave-owners in the antebellum South — he published "Lost in the City," a cycle of 14 tales that did for African-American Washington, D.C., what James Joyce did for his native city in "Dubliners."

"Lost in the City," a PEN/Hemingway Award-winner and National Book Award finalist, depicted a D.C. of small-town intimacy (watchful neighborhood eyes, wagging neighborhood tongues) and big-city trouble (poverty, unemployment, drink, drugs, domestic violence). It was a city a world away from the tourist city of museums and landmarks, and far removed, too, from the halls of power.

This was Washington the way most of its residents knew it, blacks having long been in the majority in the District of Columbia. It was also a city scarcely touched on in American fiction, and you could hardly miss Jones' sense of mission as he made it his main character in a book that wasn't a mere miscellany but a beautifully orchestrated suite.

Now, in "All Aunt Hagar's Children," his new book of stories (again 14 of them), Jones pulls off much the same magic. But he also travels farther afield, flashing forward and backward in his characters' lives across the whole 20th century, lending some of these tales the reach of small novels.

His prose here is allusive, suggestive, less direct than it was in "Lost in the City." Some story lines, stepping out in unexpected directions across time and space, hang by the slimmest and brightest of intuitive threads. The writers he calls to mind are Eudora Welty and Alice Munro at their most venturesome, stretching what a story can do, yet always staying true to the spirit of place.

"Resurrecting Methuselah," for instance, opens simultaneously in Okinawa and Washington, D.C., then searches out stranger haunts from there.

An overseas army sergeant, after "finishing his business" with a prostitute, becomes convinced that she has stabbed him by some otherworldly means. What she's actually done is put her finger on a tumor he hadn't noticed before: a medical emergency.

His marriage is in a doubtful state, however, and though his spouse back in D.C. tries to do the wifely thing by flying out to him, she just can't go through with it. She also can't bring herself to confront her daughter's fourth-grade teacher, who has brought Christianity into his classroom big time by telling his students they can live even longer than Methuselah if they'll accept Jesus. (The kids' homework assignment: finding out how old their grandparents lived to be, and why they fell so short of the 900-year mark.)

The story's strands of mortal threat and dreams of immortality are firmly rooted in everyday detail. The parents' long-distance marriage is going through recognizable doldrums. The girl is a convincingly idea-obsessed little girl: "Jesus doesn't go everywhere. He's not in Lapland. He's never going to Lapland."

And yet the story looks beyond its own quotidian reality toward something far-flung, almost transcendent.

The title story, likewise, has a semi-mystical slant to it. The narrator is a young Korean War veteran all set to go gold-prospecting in Alaska. The trouble is, his mother and aunt want him to solve the murder of a friend's son first. He obliges them. But the real mystery he's trying to solve is the meaning of the last words a woman uttered when she collapsed and died in his arms, after they exited a D.C. streetcar together. Several realities collide here — and dreams of Alaska become a moot point.

In other stories, a foster child finds his world so provisional that he can't respond to a real offer of refuge; a womanizing husband in his 60s loses all sense of sexual and social boundaries after his wife dies; and an ex-con, upon his release, suspects that "men and women were now speaking a new language, and that he would never learn it."

In a supernatural vein, a woman who survives the death of her entire family realizes there are others like her — exactly like her — in the world. And the Devil himself turns up on a seduction campaign at a Safeway supermarket.

As in "Lost in the City," Jones is obsessed with urban geography, naming precise cross-street coordinates to hint at varying degrees of neighborhood vitality and decay. He also highlights what a magnet Washington was to Southern blacks looking to escape their home states' segregation-era oppression.

The city, oversold by rumor, figures in some characters' minds as an opulent equal-opportunity utopia. The reality proves different, of course, offering possibilities for some, but also segregation as firm as any in the Deep South.

In "Tapestry," the book's beautiful closing story, Jones pulls back from his characters (en route by train from Mississippi to D.C.) to spell out what they're bringing with them: "None of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations."

One by one, the stories in "All Aunt Hagar's Children" reveal each stage of those generational changes. In the process, Jones shows moments of great folly, moments of great decency and plenty of scramble-toned moments in between, in a big, roomy book packed with vivid samplings of human tragedy and comedy.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com. He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998, and has also published four novels.