David Jauss’s fiction is rich i
n sensory imagery that is at once evocative and enveloping for the reader and the trigger of memories for the characters in his stories. He relies not only on visual images but employs all the senses to create an immersive experience.
In “The Stars at Noon,” a story about an elderly nun in the process of dying we begin with the nun, Anastasia, coughing herself awake in her hospital bed, beginning with her initial disorientation:
She had been sleeping, it seemed, then she heard someone cough. Who is coughing? she thought. Then she realized: it was herself,
Silly old woman, Silly have-dead old woman.
This is followed by imagery vividly rendered using all five senses:
Then she noticed that she was sitting up. Why? She looked around the hospital room. The vaporizer breathing the menthol odor of death. The late afternoon light on the linoleum like the outline of someone killed in a highway accident.
Anastasia shivered. Why did she have to think such thoughts? This was no time to think like that. This was a time for joy.
She lay back into herself, hugged the chill inside her. I wouldn’t be long now.
Now what was that? Nurses talking in the hallway? She raised her head from the pillow and strained to hear what they were saying. But she couldn’t make out the words over the hiss of the vaporizer. So she lay back.
Then it wasn’t nurses talking. It was cicadas buzzing in the trees around her father’s farm.
This imagery triggers a memory for Anastasia:
She’d heard that ratcheting hum every August when she was growing up. Once, she and Tom collected the brittle, umber-colored husks left in the elms after the humming stopped.
Later, vivid imagery is used to lead us into Anastasia’s spiritual reflection on her failing health:
Anastasia crossed her hands at her neck, trying to strangle the cough before it became a cough. But it began anyway, and she coughed until she was dizzy, until green and gold burned neon under her eyelids.
She thought: so much pain. But what was this compared to the agony in the garden, the sweating of blood, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion and death? No, it was wrong to complain about a little cough. Her suffering was meaningless. She wished she could cough blood, to make herself more worthy of death.
In this passage, the cough is first personified as something that can be strangled, and then she compares her suffering to that of Jesus, revealing to the reader the depth of her religious faith.
In “Beautiful Ohio,” the narrator is a waitress working in a restaurant. The couple Gloria observes sitting alone at the table set the story’s plot in motion by reminding her of her husband leaving her several years before. Jauss combines very specific details with Gloria’s assumptions about the people she is observing:
This couple came in and took a table in the far corner, where the shadows almost swallow up the candlelight. That’show I knew they were lovers, not father and daughter. That, and the way he held her hands and leaned over the table, his eyes never leaving her face all the while he talked to her. He was old enough to be her father, though: at least forty-five, maybe fifty. But his hair was that sort of premature gray that somehow makes a man seem younger instead of older, and he had the tan of a movie star or a doctor. He was wearing a white sport jacket and a navy knit shirt open at the neck, and he had two silver rings on his left hand. The girl was just a girl, blond, like they always were at that age, at least for the summer. She wasn’t wearing any makeup that I could see, but then who needs it when you’re that young.
This triggers her thoughts about her husband leaving her several years earlier and gives the reader the necessary backstory to interpret the narrator’s reaction and subsequent behavior:
Of course I thought right away about Roy and that high school dropout of his. How could I help it? I try not to think about him, but what can I do? Lenny tells me to forget Roy and marry him, but it’s not that easy. We were married sixteen years. His new wife was still crawling around in diapers when we walked down the aisle.
Gloria is living with chronically unemployed Lenny who is badgering her about getting married. Gloria stalls giving him an answer as long as she can, not really knowing what she wants and being torn between being lonely or getting encumbered in another commitment to an unreliable partner.
She finally agrees to not only marry Lenny but to also have a child with him, but the story ends with some ominous imagery and how she views her future:
And suddenly I felt bloated, not with child, but with clay and I saw myself lying there, on the banks of the beautiful Ohio, my mouth and hands smeared with clay. I shut my eyes on that vision, and Lenny arched over me, holding himself at arms’ length above me, and moved in me faster and faster until finally, he came. “Oh,” he said then, and it could have a word in a foreign language. I didn’t know what it meant, whether happiness of discovery or pain or surprise. And then he lowered his weight down on me.
In “Brothers,” two brothers who had been extremely close in childhood have become estranged as adults after the wife of one of them has driven a wedge between them, that eventually caused a dispute over their inheritance. The aggrieved brother, Ted, carries a resentment that affects him for the rest of his life. Along with the narrator’s direct accounting of the disputes, Jauss includes a few very specific details that implicitly convey the differences in financial security between the two brothers:
I’d driven over to see Mom at the retirement center every month or two, but I always made sure to visit on a weekday, when Marty and Frances would be at work. And I’d never stopped by their place, though I always thought about it. Once we passed on the street, Marty in that shiny pickup of his and me in my ramshackle Escort, and though I’m sure he recognized me, he didn’t wave and neither did I.
The present action of the narrative is Ted returning home in an attempt to reconcile with his brother, Marty, before Marty dies of leukemia. Neither Marty nor Marty’s wife, Frances, are happy to see Ted, and the attempt at recognition fails. On his way home, Ted has an epiphany that at least allows him to see his own actions being responsible for the estrangement, which allows him to at least reconcile with himself by admitting to himself that he loves his brother:
I couldn’t make that feeling last, though. By the time I turned onto the highway, I was bawling so hard I couldn’t even stop to see Mom.
God, how I loved my brother.
Jauss’s vivid imagery and the specific details that he chooses to achieve multiple storytelling goals. They can reveal characters their emotional states, trigger memories, and above all, create an immersive experience for the reader.
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