A review by wathohuc
Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson

4.0

On the whole, I enjoyed this collection of stories. McPherson is undoubtedly a talented writer. It is worthy, in my estimation, of the Pulitzer. Now, the thing about short stories is that they are constrained by their length into seeming incomplete in comparison to a novel. And this I found to be true about this collection. The stories are powerful, but seem to be incomplete. They often end ambiguously. Some are better than others. In fact, I found the earlier stories to be much better than the later stories, at least in terms of descriptive narrative. The later stories were much more abstract and philosophical, which made them a bit unintelligible, though I found them attractive in the sense that they were experimental for the short story form. The last story, and the title of the collection, is very powerful as a commentary on the possibilities and challenges of overcoming racial divides through interracial marriage and mixed race offspring. Makes me wonder what McPherson would think of the current times we are living in. Are there new stories to tell today? Are they the same basic stories today as they were of the times when this collection was published?