There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
The stories cover relatively narrow thematic terrain, but their emotional territory is expansive. Watson refreshes and destabilizes the Southern literary traditions and cultural tropes his work embraces. He does not pander and is never just playing the hits ... There Is Happiness is also saddled with four (four!) epigraphs from a sequence of poems called The Watson Poems, by Watson’s friend Michael Pettit ... It’s not the verses themselves I’m objecting to — they are lovely and accomplished — but rather their overdetermining presence on the doorpost of this book. It’s another case where sentimentality, however well-intentioned, works against itself ... The new stories are excellent, and we should be grateful to have them.
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The voice of these stories calls to mind the comic lyricism of Charles Portis and Thomas McGuane ... Death is another everyday mystery in this wonderful collection, and Watson treats it with consoling equanimity, fascinated but never overawed.
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Wry, tender, darkly funny, and deeply idiosyncratic ... Strange, wondrous, luminous—a lovely coda to a career (and a life) cut sadly short.
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