My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Brief Article

I read Carol Bly's My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories (Milkweed, 2000) in the first part of the year, having nabbed a copy from the magazine's bookshelf. I felt as though I was seated on a bus next to a usually circumspect stranger who, because she doesn't know me, confides more than she should--though in a low tone so others won't hear.

Bly's characters, at least to this Midwesterner, seem familiar--like a neighbor raking his lawn, or someone you often see walking down the sidewalk. And she portrays them at first from a respectful distance. But she slowly leads the way into their lives, and to moments of decision and extraordinary transformation. We meet a "thirty-three-year-old divorcee" named Mary Graving while she is quietly getting tipsy in a VFW bar. At the very end of the story, after she has been insulted by her mother-in-law and gotten into a fight with a troubled woman, we learn the reason for her presence at the VFW. She is celebrating her decision not to commit suicide.

Another story concerns Jack Canon, the town's funeral director, a man cut off from physical life, yet...