Better homes & prose gardens

You’d think that post-modernism has had its day and there’s no turning back with Connie J. Maraan’s Better Homes & Other Fictions (UST Press 2011), collected prose written in the old school style without sounding the least bit retro. This is actually her second collection of stories, after Transient some years ago.

If there’s anything remarkable about these stories is that they seem to be underwritten yet achieve much in terms of pushing the threshold of the imagination, such that if the collection appears thin — no more than eight stories including two parables, plus a pair of essays on the writing, teaching life — it is deceptively so. The writer needs only so much space to make the story grow, and nowhere else does the maxim less is more hold truer.

The parables themselves are astute character studies, sketches on the brink of Jungian archetype. The Magdalene, the northern woman, yes they may be oppressed figures whose luck has perhaps run out, and the political undertones are certainly not lost on the reader. Everything comes as in slow motion, and here we can maybe credit her enduring mentors the Tiempos of Dumaguete, in the meticulous description, the deliberate narrative. When the writer ends a story, that’s it, there’s no turning back, sorry. Reader makes do with what’s left on the page, the age-old tempus fugit.

Of the stories proper, “The Key” is a wonderful brief narrative on women trying to retrieve a key left in a keyhole after being locked out, a possibly universal experience for anyone who has been locked out — out of cars, houses, whatnot. It might even be said to be a cautionary tale for the outsider looking in, though distance not to mention objectivity has its advantages, foremost of which is non-attachment. The writer makes a better home in a Zen garden.

“A Little Secret” is disarming in its depiction of a mother and daughter and how they cope in their daily lives, the older woman slowly fading with Alzheimer’s. The author calmly situates the mother’s affliction in the context of mundane concerns, and there are enough lighthearted moments — the forgetfulness leading the character to run out naked into the streets after a bath — to balance out the inherent gravitas of the subject. Even a minor character like the neighboring kibitzer, a bit touched in the head, serves as foil and counterpoint to the maternal relationship.

It is in the maternal dynamic where Maraan has found a kind of comfort zone, if one can call it that, as “The Wake” promptly places such mom-daughter relationship in the midst of a wake, and here the story becomes less a comedy of manners than a reflection on mortality’s not exactly sordid intimations.

There’s that incident where lizard droppings fall on the head of the narrator at the wake, as of this were a sardonic blessing. But this so-called blessing can only be high irony, just as the leftover grease in the unused plates on the buffet table lends a comic touch, like Michael V and Jenny Jamora in that dishwashing commercial.

Trust the author, too, to paint a lucid picture of the province after the madness of city life. It is in the rural setting where the writer regains her equilibrium, and death however proud, becomes another character, the great leveler leveled out in a box at stage center.

The essays serve as bookends in the collection, like the writer’s ars poetica. Just as her teaching has sandwiched her writing, and each vocation like a counter-flow to prevent Maraan from disappearing into the other. Some writers disappear into the classroom, other teachers get sucked into a printed page, but Better Homes lays down markers on how to keep a delicate balance between both worlds, and indeed how they can feed off each other. In this wise the columnist Butch Dalisay comes to mind.

And to some extent even Maraan’s teacher at De La Salle, Cirilo Bautista, he who in one graduate class in the mid-1990s said, “There’s no such thing as grammatical error, only ideological comprehension.”

Or should we say, ideological miscomprehension. Where even the slightest typographical error or misplaced punctuation mark, whether or not intentional, will reap the subconscious, semiotic whirlwind.

Footnotes galore reference some mutual favorites in the writing world, such as Gina Apostol and Jeanette Winterson, for the academic purposes of text ad subtext, however to the writer’s credit she does not get carried away in theory, an easy temptation to succumb to in the guise of scholarship.

There’s no faulting Maraan either if the world of her fiction is largely inhabited by women, but she’s no feminist. At least not by this reading, though the F-word may claim her as its own. It is the world she moves around in, as if in shattered space. A space, lest one forget, that is also inhabited by her students, and reams of uncorrected test papers at bedside.

The selected prose has the added blessing of giving names to things, as in the ornamental plant foxface, which the writer Krip Yuson (also mentioned in the book) occasionally uses like baby’s breath to adorn gifts to give away. Aka Mickey Mouse plant.

Better Homes is a quiet, unassuming work, very likely as quiet and unassuming as the author herself.