The Wide Net and Other Stories

by Eudora Welty

Book Overview

These eight stories reveal the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired writers. Set in the Old Natchez Trace region, the stories dip in and out of history and range from virgin wilderness to a bar in New Orleans. In each story, Miss Welty sustains the high level of performance that, throughout her distinguished career, has won her numerous literary awards. "Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time"...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156966107
• ISBN13: 9780156966108
• Release Date: March 1974
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Three men and a heron

`The Mississippi shuddered and lifted from its bed, reaching like a somnambulist driven to go in new places; the ice stretched far out over the waves.' Page one of First Love, the first story in this collection. The Wide Net was Welty's second published short story collection. It came out in 1943, and all stories had been published previously. In her first story book (Curtain of Green), I was a little unhappy with some of the stories. They seemed to me examples of a certain simplistic genre, where writer and reader conspire to make fun of the stupidity of people, and where we are watching grotesque people or grotesque events, like readers of yellow press products. The Wide Net does not have that kind of writing, and that alone is reason why I like it better. But I still don't like it all the way. The language is fresh and aggressive, but also flawed. Please look at the sentence that I quote above, from First Love. It shows both, the strength and the failure of Welty's style. It is all very nice for the river to shudder and reach etc; but never will ice stretch far out over waves. That just does not happen in this world, unless I totally misunderstand the meaning of this sentence. The title story tells us of a young man who is afraid that his young pregnant wife may have jumped into the river. He calls a friend and most of the neighborhood men, and starts dredging the river with a wide net. We expect a drama and are given a farce. The men have a jolly good fishing day. A lovely story, but a little inconsequential. As it is, I like it better than if it had stayed on its starting course of drama. Welty lets us meet historical persons. Aaron Burr and his treason trial are observed through the eyes of a deaf 12 year old orphan who works in a Natchez Inn as a bootblack. Audubon meets, by coincidence, 2 other historical figures, an evangelist on a soul fishing trip, and an outlaw on his hunt for robbery victims, in a moment of silent beauty. Which gets disturbed by Audubon, the pragmatist. Something for birders. More of a mythical nature: Asphodel, the Greek underworld's location for the boring neutral souls, who are neither heroic nor damnable, is visited by 3 spinsters who tell each other of a friend's exciting and dramatic life. We also have stories on the edge of the esoteric (the little girl moving in and out of dreams during a storm, and finding real life evidence of her imagined play mate next day; the gambling place where the same old woman with a purple hat shows up every day over 30 years and gets killed twice...). Not my favorite genre either, but better than `Southern Gothic'. I don't know Welty's later work yet, but her moving away from the early `realism' is still unclear to me. Where was she going? I will have to read the Golden Apples to find out.

First Read

I waited way too long to read Eudora Welty, but for those in the same situation, The Wide Net is a fine place to start. In reading, you will likely be reminded of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Clearly a Southern writer like them, Welty respects her often peculiar characters. She uses sly humer well, as in the title story where a bridegroom searching the river for his presumably drowned wife nonetheless is able to haul up a slew of fish to be sold on the streets of town. Each of her main characters is memorable, with the finely drawn quirkiness that stamps them as individuals. Of the eight stories here, the best are The Wide Net, First Love, A Still Moment and The Purple Hat. Only Asphodel and At the Landing didn't work for me in their attempts -- I think -- to spin realism into myth. Her fine attention to detail and description stays with a reader long after the story's end. When she nails something, it stays nailed. For example, it will be some time before I forget the scene of the deaf bootblack boy watching a sleeping Aaron Burr in First Love, and this passage from that scene -- "The heart is secret even when the moment it dreamed of has come, a moment when there might have been a revelation...." Or this evocation of New Orleans that opens The Purple Hat -- "It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery relection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans."