The Wide Net by Eudora Welty

 

These eight stories from Eudora Welty give readers a glimpse into life in the South, specifically Mississippi during the 1900's.  Welty was born in 1909 and died in 2001 at the age of 92.  Her work included short stories and novels and she won many prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for Fiction.  Her work focused on the people and life of the South, showing the faults of the region but also the love and culture found there.

My favorite story in this collection was the title story, The Wide Net.  In it, William Wallace Jamieson's wife, Hazel, is missing.  She is pregnant and demanding.  All William Wallace had done was stay out all night, drinking and carousing with his buddies.  He returns to find a note saying she can't stand this life and is off to do away with herself.  William Wallace rounds up his friends, sure that Hazel has gone to the river and drowned herself.  They borrow a wide net from a neighbor and the whole collection goes down to the Natchez Trace path and throw the net to see if they can find Hazel's body.  Although they work the entire day, encountering wildlife and other river hazards, they find nothing.  William Wallace returns home to find Hazel there all along.

Another story I liked was The Purple Hat.  In it, the man who watches over the floor of a gambling establishment tells the story of a woman, middle-aged, who comes everyday wearing an old bedraggled purple hat.  She is a ghost and he tells her stories and the deaths he has seen her endure.  All of the stories give insight into the language of the time and the attitudes of the two main races living there.  It is a peephole into a life that has disappeared except in the most rural areas and the enduring relationship such folks had with the land and the rivers that transversed it.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction, specifically short stories.