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You’ve seen the characters who populate “The Snowman,” George Ovitt’s collection of 14 works of short fiction.
There’s the couple bickering over dinner at Applebee’s; the sullen suburban next-door neighbor; the schoolteacher forced into retirement, now traveling across the country with his wife in their oversized RV; the extended family at the airport, reuniting amid forced holiday merriment.
Ovitt has seen them and tells their stories.
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“The Snowman, Stories” by George Ovitt Blue Mustang Press, $12.95, 196 pp. |
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The stories examine, in the words of one of the characters, “what has happened to us,” and what has happened to America over the last 30 years, the changes that so often have crept upon us.
Ovitt reveals those changes, makes us think about them and the way they affect these seemingly ordinary people, and as we see them reflected in ourselves.
In his essay “Fiction and Empathy,” which was published in the August 2011 Atticus Review, Ovitt writes:
“I would argue that it is precisely because good books allow us vicarious insights into the inner lives of other human beings that we feel pleasure when we read. We want to know what others think and feel so that we can make sense of what we think and feel. Recall that the Greek word pathos means ‘experience’ as well as ‘emotion.’ To have empathy is to move within range of another’s experience – to share in their humanity.”
Ovitt’s stories in “The Snowman” are brimming with such empathy, gentle humor and pathos.
These are people coming to grips with their own weaknesses as they sometimes overcome – or just as often succumb to – obstacles to happiness and meaning to their lives.
Ovitt writes with clarity and precision, as befits the Albuquerque Academy history teacher that he is; one senses that he emphasizes the importance of such qualities to his students.
But he also isn’t hesitant to vary his style and occasionally surprise the reader with something more experimental, such as a morning-after-a-one-night-stand story conveyed solely through dialogue. Throughout the stories in “The Snowman” there are notes of the unexpected in the ordinary that make it such a pleasure to read.
Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque poet and writer.
