Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (July 2018)
Elbow Room is James Alan McPherson’s 1977 short story collection. I read four of these stories a second time – ‘Why I Like Country Music’, ‘The Story of a Scar’, and ‘I Am An American’ included among them. The story that I enjoyed the most was ‘A Loaf Of Bread’. It was about a man who must make a decision about the future of his business after his community felt wronged by his pricing practices and I thought the story was told in a way that lived up to its excellent premise.
In addition to being a story I liked, I thought ‘A Loaf Of Bread’ also best represented the collection’s broad exploration of the pressure communities place on their members to live up to certain assumptions or expectations. McPherson’s characters react to this pressure in different ways and each story demonstrates how the partnership of community can harm or help us. As one of his stories points out, a person doesn’t outrun threats any faster just because he or she is part of a community – the purpose of community is to establish the strength in numbers that prevent individuals from being targeted by threats in the first place.
There were a few other thoughts I liked from these stories – that advertising always hides a lack of underlying permanence, for example, or that people like music when it connects them to memories or to people in the vicinity. And finally – though I recognize that acknowledging the wisdom of this thought risks invalidating the premise of these ‘reading reviews’ – I did appreciate the observation that always breaking things down into little pieces eventually makes it difficult to fully grasp longer or more complex ideas.
