The prolific Richard Bausch has written 13 novels and 10 story collections. His latest collection, The Fate of Others, includes a novella, a short memoir and 10 stories that affirm Bausch’s reputation as one of America’s greatest storytellers. 

Many of these stories originally appeared in Narrative magazine, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, River Teeth and other literary magazines. 

The Fate of Others

by Richard Bausch

Knopf

352p $29

Bausch is a realist (though he dislikes the term). He writes stories of despair, grief and hope, and of memory, fear and surviving life’s ordinary and extraordinary troubles. Or, as he said in one interview, paraphrasing Marianne Moore, he is “making up imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Artistic types like poets, music composers and fiction writers populate many of his stories, with Ernest Hemingway even making an appearance. Other stories involve ordinary characters: a police detective, a school superintendent, a community of altar boys and a rich, shady Italian businessman. 

One of the best stories in this collection, “In That Time,” is a coming-of-age story originally published in Narrative and included in the 2020 edition of the Pushcart Prize’s annual anthology. The title refers to Hemingway’s first short story collection, In Our Time. Clark, the narrator, reminisces about the time he, at 12 years old in 1949, had breakfast with Hemingway in Cuba. 

It is mid-June when Clark accompanies his stepmother and his father, an old Navy man he calls “the Captain,” to Cuba. The Captain was supposed to start a charter fishing business with his friend Cookie, but the deal was a scam that cost him a “lot of money.” Eventually, the Captain joins Clark and Hemingway for breakfast and they speculate about the apparent suicide of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. As he listens to the men talk about the suspicious death, Clark is certain he knows how Hemingway’s life will end.

The novella Broken House is another fine bildungsroman. Retired history professor Vance Bourdin recalls his days as an altar boy in 1959 at St. Agnes of Rome Catholic Church and School in Point Royal, Va. Bausch masterfully recreates a frightening time when nearly every American feared communism, the atomic bomb and the end of the world. It is even worse if you’re a teenager like Vance and his friend Phillip Chorros, torn between the physical and the spiritual world. For a time, Vance even considers “the idea of renouncing the life of the world…perhaps becoming a monk.” 

In those days, corporal punishment was commonplace, and Vance’s nemesis, Father Burns, is a strict disciplinarian. One of Father Burns’s rarely used punishments, “the Beltline,” a form of flogging, influences Vance’s decision whether to remain an altar boy. Much later, Vance, the historian, meets his old friend Chorros, who divulges horrible secrets about himself and the priests during his altar boy days.

In “Donnaiolo” (Italian for womanizer), 29-year-old Angela Halliford returns home from Italy to live with her parents after being divorced. Bausch depicts Angela’s plight with relentless precision. She is morose, stays in her old room, never cleans up after herself and doesn’t seem to care about anything. After several weeks, Angela’s mother goes from worry to anger when Angela’s ex-husband returns to the United States with the idea of getting back together and staying at the Halliford house. Angela’s mother becomes so angry that she charges them rent in advance at hotel room rates. Angela pays her with the money her ex’s father has given her, with promises to leave in a week. One week becomes many, but Angela forks out the cash at the start of each week. 

As if that isn’t enough, Bausch adds more family heartache when Angela’s former father-in-law announces he wants his son, that womanizer and “toad in the garden,” extradited to face statutory rape charges in Italy.

In the Bausch garden, the supernatural isn’t unheard of, but it is rare. In his extraordinary short story “The Widow’s Tale,” Bausch treads around the supernatural. Stoical Susan Bridge’s younger sister Moira, 37, tries to convince her older sister that Susan’s dead husband wants to talk to her. “There’s a red dial phone,” Moira says, “and he hands me the receiver looking sad but there’s interference in the line. And I think the interference is your refusal to take this seriously.” Moira’s 84-year-old husband Owen suggests holding a séance conducted by their new friend, a medium, another odd creature in the garden. Susan reluctantly agrees but then breaks up the séance. It is as if Bausch transports Susan back to the harsh natural world; soon afterward, she begins to accept “the full, actual force of her sorrow” at the death of her husband.

In “The Fate of Others,” the distinguished poet Thomas Fearing drives down from Phoenix to visit with his daughter and son-in-law Billy Jordan. Fearing is on a 32-city tour, reading from his latest poetry collection. Fearing is a complex character who could be portrayed as a stereotype by a lesser writer, instead of the multifaceted fellow that Bausch creates. Humor lightens a serious tale that only a writer of Bausch’s caliber could execute. During a night of Fearing’s drinking and carousing, Jordan discovers that the “highly honored and distinguished father was not a very nice man.” Fearing is indulgent, savage and outrageous. He loves to point out the failings and deficiencies of his contemporaries, colleagues and friends. And if that isn’t bad enough, he urinates in an outdoor fountain—twice.

The previous two stories bear dedications, as does “A Memory, and Sorrow (an Interval),” a brief memoir dedicated to the author’s late twin brother “Bobbie” (Robert Bausch). Originally published in the nonfiction literary journal River Teeth, the memoir tells the story of two brothers who enlist in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the infantry. Rumors travel among the airmen about a possible suicide and death during basic training. It’s a phenomenon that leads Bausch’s story to a beautiful arc of mourning the death of his brother.

Elijah Casado, the detective in “Forensics,” has been beaten down with the horrors of police work and, at 48, wants to go into a new line of work. He has a B.A. in English and he and his wife Mae figure it wouldn’t take much work to get a teaching certificate and teach at the local high school. When Mae’s old friend Evelyn Draper, who’s married to the new superintendent of schools, calls out of the blue after 14 years, Mae invites the Drapers over for dinner, figuring he might help Elijah get a teaching job. But Draper wants to consult Casado on a police novel that he’s writing and he lets down Casado when he says doesn’t have much to do with hiring teachers.

This diverse story collection arrives about two years after Bausch’s novel, the wondrous tragicomedy Playhouse. After The Stories of Richard Bausch appeared in 2003, he published other short fiction collections that also deserve reading: Wives & Lovers (2004), Something Is Out There (2010) and Living in the Weather of the World (2017). Bausch is amassing a collection of fiction that proves him to be one of the great modern masters of the novel and the short story. His latest stories, whether they occur in a nursing home or during the Covid-19 pandemic, become, in his hands, exciting and resonant; they form imprints on the reader’s memory that are akin to the memory imprints his characters experience.