Book Review: Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver

Diane Oliver is a writer who published just six short stories and died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, when she was only twenty-two years old. Recently, eight more of her short stories were found, and a collection of the entire fourteen stories was published by Grove Atlantic fifty-eight years after her death. Most of these stories share very intimate portraits of African American families that are trying to desparately live in racially segregated times. I received a review copy from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for honest feedback. 

Tayari Jones, who penned an introduction for this collection, describes these stories as 'time capsules'. Most of the stories describe the situation of African American families in the 1960s, especially the women, who are caught between two opposing forces. The progressive elements of society want integration, with blacks being able to participate equally in society along with others. But there are the regressive elements that violently oppose it, with silent support from those in power, as is subtly suggested in some of the stories. Caught in the crossfire, many families are unable to decide what they actually want—to support and participate in the struggle for socially elevating themselves or to prioritise the safety of their loved ones and maintain the status quo. 

Neighbours, the first and title story of the collection, tells about the plight of such a family. Tommy is being integrated into a new school in the first grade. The story tells us about the events happening in his home the previous night through the eyes of his big sister. How does the family view the issue—as a necessary political situation for them to manoeuvre or a potential safety risk for their small kid that could leave him scarred for life? The situation is repeated in the second story, The Closet on the Top Floor, in which a college girl loses her sense of reality when she is pulled by these two opposing forces. 

There are a few more stories in the collection that deal with the same theme, like Before Twilight, in which a young girl decides to join her friends in entering a restaurant that caters to whites only and face the consequences, only to return to her familial duties at the end of the day. In the fourth story, Health Service, we find a new theme being added. The writer focuses on the situation of women. Women are forced to work in rich, white households, keeping their small kids at home, while their men leave for northern towns to look for work for months on end without any contact or communication, sometimes just to abandon them. In Health Service, we find Libby, such a poor woman, struggling to get medical services for her kids. 

Key to the City has a mother and her children moving to a distant city in search of her man. Traffic Jam and No Brown Sugar in Anybody's Milk are two stories that portray the lives of women employed in white households. Mint Juleps Not Sold Here is an oddity, as it is a tale with a violent twist. The Visitor is the story of a troubled teenager visiting the house of her father and his second wife, told from the perspective of the wife. Banago Kalt is a story in a lighter vein, where a black girl visits Switzerland along with two white girls as part of a social experiment. When the Apples Are Ripe is a rare story in the collection where we find true integration being played out between two races against all odds.

Two stories, Our Trip to the Nature Museum and Spiders Cry Without Tears, have white women as narrators and are possibly an attempt to watch things from a different perspective and find out the effect of integration on white people. Although all these stories are unbelievably good, it is the story Frozen Voices that really made me realise how much this writer could contribute to literature if she lived. Frozen Voices employs a radically different style and structure. It is a simple enough plot of jealousy, betrayal, and murder. But the writer employs a looping narrative and cleverly intermixes narrators and points of view to add layers to the plot. 

The surprising level of detailing that the writer uses in these stories has contributed much to transmitting the experiences of its characters to the reader. Oliver never misses anything and boldly describes each and every movement of her characters once she starts telling their tale. It is also interesting to note that sometimes the story is told from the point of view of someone who isn't necessarily the protagonist. This leads to a new level of understanding of the characters and their premises. Neighbours and Other Stories serves as an important document that helps us measure where the two races stand against each other with respect to the time in which it is written. We can observe that, though the situations have definitely changed, there is no integration in the true sense. They still stand on opposite sides of the racial divide, maintaining a certain level of suspicion against each other.