The Price of Eggs

By Anne Panning

Short stories depicting individuals trying to live with and without their dysfunctional families, clinging to whatever stability they can find.

"Newcomer Panning tracks the dreams and travails of a passel of hard-luck Minnesotans. A chronically depressed, perpetually medicated woman ('I'm Joan, the sick one, don't mind when I throw my lamp against the wall') uneasily coexists with her older sister Lillian and Lillian's alcoholic boyfriend ('I hate him and he hates me'). An unsightly facial cyst hampers Rollie, a lab technician, in finding a girlfriend; loyal Harlan, an 18-year-old hired farmhand, is unfairly booted from his job when his wife is nine months pregnant; 12-year-old Ivan's father ran off with the librarian, leaving him to cope with his unbalanced mother and a styful of unruly pigs; and trailer-park denizen Lizzie has an alcoholic father who ekes out a meager living as a barber, and a farmer uncle who sexually abuses his daughter in Lizzie's presence." --Publishers Weekly

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918273951
• ISBN13: 9780918273956
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Extrordinary in the Ordinary

The characters in Anne Panning's The Price of Eggs are indeed those whose "...working and living [are] often invisible in literature". These characters are the kinds of people that we interact with everyday, the people whose stories we do not know, the people we pass on the street without a second glance; the lunch lady and and her sister, the social studies teacher, the waitress, the janitor, the barber and his family -- people we all know but rarely know. Their ordinariness sets them apart and Panning lends great individuality to each. She shows us that every person has a story, and every person has a tragic quality to their life. Panning proves that the common individual has tragedy just as valid as any known in traditional literature -- located within the unarticulated longing that fills the lives of her characters, as it fills the lives of her readers. In the first story of her book, "This is Salvation", she first introduces us to people that we do not know, but that we might pass on the street everyday. We meet Penny, "...a big red-haired girl in her twenties..." Junior, "His dad's the drug dealer, and gives to him. This is love..." and Jasmine, "At night, she sleeps in front of tv. Low murmuring. A guardian angel..." We meet all these people and more, and Panning shows us who they are by showing us how they are. In her third person narratives, Panning utilizes an unconventional structure that employs short staccato sentences and fragments which tend to draw the reader into the work as if the sentences were a urgently running stream of thoughts/impressions drawn from observation. This style drives the reader onward, without time for immediate reflection, much the same way that life presents people to us. Her characters are deeply drawn in their synoptic style and we feel that we can ascribe motivations to their actions just by benefit of the little knowledge we have. The urgent brevity of her sentences works far better than lengthy drawn out descriptions because they function in the same way that our own powers of observation work when we examine real people that we know. When she shifts to first person narrative in such stories as "The Price of Eggs" and "Rudy and Bette's New Year" she does so in such a way that each character has the opportunity to have their own say, presenting one series of events through different eyes in a way that underscores the subjective nature of experience. This technique serves to further engage the reader, leaving them with the impression that they have had a personal conversation with each character and through that conversation have gained deeper insight into the mind of each character, by hearing what is important to each one. Although she has not spent pages building up scenery or states of mind, Panning accomplishes much in the space of a few words. One of the most stirring pieces, "Trailer Court Days" uses brief snippets of memory to allow us a complete understanding of the main character, Lizzie.