A Gram of Mars: Stories

By Becky Hagenston

Book Overview

Becky Hagenston's debut collection, A Gram of Mars was selected by A.M. Homes as the 1997 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these stories portray the modern family as one that refuses to be fashionably dysfunctional. In the hyphenated, divorced, and step-parented context of the late twentieth century, Hagenston reminds us, it is the minister and his wife in a small town in Maryland who are unconventional. These stories, conveyed with spirited, conversational prose, prove that the meaning of family prevails. In "Holding the Fort," a husband's infidelity dissolves his marriage but not the couple's emotional ties. And in "A Gram of Mars," an adult daughter responds to her divorced father's anguish upon learning of his ex-wife's remarriage, and the whole fractured family reconvenes for an evening: "Beside me, my father is breathing slow and regular as a child, and I wonder suddenly if he's fallen asleep. But his eyes are open, fixed on the road. For a moment, I believe I know what he's thinking-he has seen the woman he loves, and his daughter is beside him, and for now everything is just as simple as that. . . . When he sighs, I lean back in my seat and try to think of nothing. The sky vaults over us and silence settles down, like a pact we've made together, like a precious, immeasurable weight."

Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, "If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father-then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?"

Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, and Carolina Quarterly. One of her stories was included in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889330221
• ISBN13: 9781889330228
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A fantastic debut!

These stories are beautifully, hauntingly written, snapshots that will stay with you long after you've finished reading them. They are brief stories of love and loss, desire and despair, that manage to engage you intimately in the space of a few pages. My favorite by far was "Fugue", the story of a father obsessed with learning to build and play the organ. I was hooked from the opening lines: "Some fathers on Saturday afternoons fix the car or spray weedkiller on the lawn. Mine would take the air apart and put it back together with a fugue." In the next paragraph, she says, "On summer evenings his organ music got stuck in the screen door and floated on top of the cat's water dish." I love it! I'll never hear music again without this image in my head. Hagenston has managed to make the organ music itself a physical presence in this story, almost another character. "Fugue" is also the most hopeful of the stories, most of which focus on characters in crisis - a woman whose husband has just left her, a preacher's wife unsure of her new position, a divorced father adrift in the world with only a gram of meteorite to show for his life. "A Gram of Mars" is a wonderfully written collection of short stories. I look forward to reading more from this author.

Richly Textured Lives

This book is for anyone who loves Alice Munro or Antonya Nelson or, for that matter, Edith Wharton or any other serious writer who works to create a complex and richly textured world. It's hard to believe that this is a first book. It's terrific.

Funny, heart-breaking, tales of broken people/families

My favorite story here is "A Gram of Mars", because it shows the lingering, telling effects of divorce on the child(ren) of the family. Not everyone has parents who are larger than life and impossibly strong; in fact, if you live long enough, no one does. The title story is so sad and so full of love..."Fugue" is magical and hilarious...and "Holding the Fort" was another standout. This author's writing reminded me of Lorie Moore, Anne Tyler, and maybe Francine Prose, just to give a general idea.