Lonely Hearts: An Image of American Writer Julie Hayden

The first part, Short Lives, is markedly feminine, and receives Hayden’s blood as if it were a life-and-death transfusion: for example, the carnal aunt of a 3-year-old boy (Walk with Charlie ), the girls who bury animals by planting wild violets on their graves (A pinch of nature) or the woman who gets lost in Manhattan (Day-old baby rats), stuffed into her fur coat, to immerse herself in her daily battles with the parcel delivery man and to deliver to a religious denomination with a flask included.

The second part, The Lists of the Past, is more masculine, it is centered on the figure of a patriarch at the gates of death, although at times his point of view is nuanced by that of one of his daughters, who at the same time refers to one of the stories in Vidas Breves. The heart separates and interconnects, it swells and relaxes as if looking for the contradictions of its own experience.

These movements of tension and rest can be disconcerting, because they take on different shapes and styles in the two sections of the book. In the early stories, the reader might recognize the echoes of the voice of Virginia Woolf and her Mrs. Dalloway, the throbbing awareness of a woman crossing stories like John Cheever’s swimmer crossing an entire neighborhood to return home through its swimming pools. . One day old baby rats is, in this sense, the most radical story in the book, and the most spectacular: traversed by abrupt ellipses, and from a poetic register that borders on a certain abstraction, the story of the wandering of this woman without name for the New York metropolis is none other than that of urban solitude, and there, stumbling, Hayden makes us feel as small before the skyscrapers and the car horns as a doll in a toy kitchen. The lyricism of the story, as in those of her contemporary Lydia Davis, has something violent, and also tremendously emotional.

That violence is transformed into serenity in the second part of the book, much more fluid and elegiac. Hayden’s prose loses some of its agitation to take on a more twilight tone, like that of a long farewell. Ben, the dying man, keeps making mental lists of everything he hasn’t done and has yet to do, and that temporary everyday life, tinged with illness, is a reminder of life. Death is nothing more than the inevitable consequence of having lived, and Hayden does not describe its imminence as something terrible, much less tremendous. With all the sadness that his stories exude, we are left with the feeling that, only by rereading them, we will know that our time here, between heaven and earth, has been worth it.