rev. of Walking on Ice by Susan Hubbard

Hubbard is an assured storyteller and a complex narrative stylist. Her collection of stories is unified in theme -- pent-up characters desiring changes that may prove creative or destructive, but which offer release and relief, and which vivify what has been known as "life." The title story provides a key image: "Without thinking she ran forward. She threw her arms skyward as she jumped. Midway cross the chasm, suspended in the darkening air, she realized where she was. But even then she had no sense of what she was doing or why she was doing it. She only knew that she was in motion, perilous motion, a chill wind full against her face. And now, beneath her, the ice was rising to meet her feet." These are stories, like dreams, anchored on narrative images. Thanks to reckless adult passion, the inadvertently and irreversibly killed child. The vanishing wife. The leap across melting ice. Consequences of impulse (where impulse comes from deep, unconscious or unacknowledged, demonic need) are
found in stories other than Hubbard's, but in hers the consequences are left ambiguous, like fantasy, up to the reader's imagination, and this is a particular mark of her complete art.

If mortality is characterized by choices for causes, the choices in these stories, while asocial and disruptive, are necessary. They are not prompted by Daisy Buchanan-like insouciance or boredom, but by darker, more primitive needs.

In my own repertoire of comparisons of affinities, I would draw parallels with Hubbard's interests and talent to those of Robley Wilson, Jr., and Evan S. Connell, for the care in prose, the ironic narrative, and the deep, mythic action or images in action that discover themselves from seemingly ordinary characters and situations. If there is a quality missing, a direction of future challenge for this writer, it would be a stronger sense of time, or, perhaps, as characteristic of Alice Munro's stories, of character in time.