Uncensored by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061755415
Publisher: HarperCollins

HAS THERE been, in recent memory, a first story collection, American or otherwise, as ambitious, varied, and compelling as John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies? These eight thematically linked stories are so richly diverse in their characters’ ethnic and family backgrounds, so provocative in their ideas, and so generously fitted out with scientific, medical, and historical information that to say that Murray (trained as a doctor, with experience as an emergency medical worker in Third World countries suffering the ravages of cholera, dysentery, and massacre) is a prodigious talent is something of an understatement.

Where most first story collections are hardly more bulky than books of poetry, likely to repeat character-types and settings from story to story, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies contains enough material for several very different novels, family sagas set on several continents and involving such vocations as microbiology and emergency medicine in Bombay (“The Hill Station”), lobster fishing in Maine and nursing in Africa for the UN (“All the Rivers in the World”), neurosurgery and butterfly collecting (“A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies”), paleontology in Iowa City, Iowa, and emergency medical work, again in Bombay (“White Flour”), missionary and medical work in the civil war–torn Congo (“Watson and the Shark”), carpentry and oil painting (“The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer”), mountain climbing in the Himalayas (“Blue”), surgery and amateur coleoptery, or beetle collecting, in Iowa City (“Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man”). As this (incomplete) catalogue suggests, Murray is not a minimalist but one for whom “Nothing is too small to escape his attention” as it’s remarked admiringly of one of his physician visionaries.

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies is a gallery of striking portraits to which narratives, most of them protracted in space and time, are sometimes awkwardly joined. In actual life, we are far more than the sum of our actions: it may even be that our actions are inadequate to suggest our complexity, or contradictory. Murray means to suggest such complexity by way of lengthy background summaries, descriptions and analyses of his characters. The author is perhaps not unlike one of his insect collectors, an Indian-born surgeon of whom it’s said, “He was obsessed with the systematic classification of his [2000] specimens, and he could talk about beetle phenetics and phylogeny for hours.”

Obviously the author is most at home with the scientifically-minded, but his zealous protagonists are as likely to be foreign-born as they are likely to be Caucasian Americans, and the professional and domestic lives of women are as likely to be explored as those of men. It’s remarked in “White Flour” that “Every family has at least one lunatic”; each story in this collection has at least one lunatic, if by “lunatic” we mean an individual possessed by the unattainable ideal, like saving lives in Third World countries in which deplorable social conditions prevail or bringing back a whole specimen of Omithoptera alexandrae (Queen Alexandria’s birdwing, the largest butterfly in the world). Murray’s women

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