Indiahoma

We are buried in books -- that's in the plural, not the singular. Most bookshelves are bulging, practically fire hazards, a few strips of wood supporting hundreds of books. Every year, like a river pushing against its banks, publishing houses flood the market with new titles, each author a potential Pulitzer prize winner. Everywhere you look, there are unopened books--warehoused, stockpiled, collecting dust before the bleary eyes of a harried reader, that singular person--never to be cloned--never to have the necessary down time to explore, scale, and conquer this towering mountain of information.

Readers in this over-scheduled era, frustrated by having their focus narrowed by time restrictions, are limiting their reading to refrigerator poetry, a daily newspaper, the back of cereal boxes… or an occasional non-fiction title. Some people even believe fiction to be frivolous, unnecessary in this age of movie blockbusters and true life TV news. And while most would-be readers don’t… won’t… and are complacent in their valley… some adventurers are scaling the heights… some have luckily found a book at the top of the mountain… a set of inter-related short stories entitled Indiahoma, Stories of Blues and Blessings, by a new author, A. Ray Norsworthy.

Norworthy's website, araynorsworthy.com, warns that Indiahoma is "not Winesburg, Ohio" and indeed, the form of the narrative is the only nod to Sherwood Anderson. There is no George, no central narrator weaving in out of his stories; instead only the reader judges characters such as Axel Freedman who dreams of being interviewed by Dan Rather "because he's the first Vietnam Vet without a colon named to the world's most beautiful people list." The omission intensifies the isolation of the characters and underscores the lack of community in the fictional town of Indiahoma… and by linking his disparate characters to a small Okie town, Norsworthy points a finger back toward the disconnected world of the reader, dramatizing the horror of the nonfunctioning American polis. The message is subtle, but effective. Also, the wounds go deeper in Indiahoma than they do in Winesburg as there are no ambiguous endings, no train out of town with talk of adventure and a young boy's coming of age. Instead, Indiahoma is "a small town between gone and went" and the residents are tethered to a tree. Norworthy's characters are nearing Act Three of their dilemmas, and all--Nick the Automan, Jack White Wolf, Eighty-four year old Jasper Lee, etc.-- are stressed descendants of Job, coping and striving for better in a world with few resources at their disposal. Norsworthy writes unflinchingly of people scarred by their fates, characters such as Lucas Moody, in "Ifs and Buts, Candy and Nuts," a despairing car salesman who sarcastically laments that he "should have stayed in the catacombs and painted frescoes with my multi-colored diarrhea until I died."

Norsworthy cops to worshipping at the altar of Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway and the influence shows in descriptions of an unforgiving Oklahoma landscape: "The red dust mixed with smoke from the prairie fires is so thick in the sky a cruising 747 could plow the south forty. The sun resembles a daub of red blood on a light bulb." In a style worthy of the greats of literature, Norsworthy repeatedly "lays truth open to the bone," but reader beware--Indiahoma is no classic Greek tragedy. The author makes sudden shifts from pathos to irony, ensuring that there is laughter, not only tears. In one story, a short history of America‘s most dysfunctional family, "Ilan Bartholomew of "Family Visits" knows that "the Pentagon has spies everywhere and they’re going to disintegrate him with laser beams someday soon unless he gives them the secret Grecian formula."

Norsworthy’s bio tells us he is the son of sharecroppers who lived in homes without indoor plumbing or electricity until he was in his teens. The hard living shows in his stories and the details of a hardscrabble life make the book read more like nonfiction than fiction.

Perhaps that is Norsworthy’s genius; his left foot is firmly placed in a dirt road past while his right one walks the Information Highway. He has witnessed the travails, the comic antics of the "eccentric outcasts, the drug crazed, the religion dazed, the alienated Native American and those of mixed race searching for a heritage." And although they cannot speak with eloquence, A. Ray Norsworthy can. And he represents his people well.

Clean out your bookcase. Ray’s coming, and he has a lot to say.


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Margaret O'Neal lives in Athens, Georgia and has been published in a few random zines such as The Dead Mule, Dakota House Journal, etc. She has read many of A. Ray Norsworthy's stories and unpublished novels and acknowledges his influence on her own work.