“There Is Happiness” presents Brad Watson’s brilliant Southern stories

Joy Williams writes in her introduction to the recently published There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories that “the novels contained deeper lyricism than the stories, focusing on a life in a single, long-gone place. … But I believe it was the short stories that he enjoyed and excelled at, those American treasures that American readers so shy away from.”

Watson’s stories are anything but typically American. His good countrymen hunt, drive trucks, and start bar fights; they know the best fishing spots, shoot guns where they shouldn’t, and dream of escaping small towns they’ll never leave; they love their dogs like children and treat their lovers like dogs. Many are drunks with hearts ready to burst, eager for experience and fleeing anything that smacks of self-knowledge. If you’re listening for an implicit sigh here, don’t bother. The stories cover relatively narrow thematic terrain, but their emotional territory is expansive. Watson refreshes and destabilizes the literary traditions and cultural tropes of the South that his work encompasses. He doesn’t give in, and he never just plays the hits.

Watson is a sympathetic and convincing portraitist of hard lives in hard places. He seasons his tragedy with comedy and his comedy with elegy. At its best, the work is worthy of comparison with Denis Johnson, Padgett Powell and Joy Williams herself, who reminds us in the introduction that “the good short story tells us something very disturbing about ourselves and our enigmatic sojourn on this earth. … This insight is the short story’s gravest gift, and Watson is a master at striking our souls with it.” She is right. Occasionally, I admit, Watson’s elegiac style – like the monologues of big-hearted drunks – drifts into grating wistfulness or swampy sentimentality, but these slips are rare indeed, and certainly more common in the novels than in the stories. I love The Heaven of Mercury, but I could imagine it 40 pages shorter, and I know which ones I would cut. That is not the case with the stories.

At 144 pages, Last Days of the Dog-Men is a collection slim enough to strive for perfection. It’s easy to see how Watson spent 10 years working on the eight stories. Bill is about an 87-year-old woman who decides to put her old dog down, but before doing so cooks him all his favorite human foods and serves them on her finest china. “As the evening progressed, Bill’s old, cataract-stricken eyes began to reflect something like silent suffering – not his usual burden, but the luxurious suffering of the glutton.” In the title story, a wayward husband compares his sufferings to those of several dogs he has known. “Humans, it seems to me, are very unaware of the artificial, intellectual side of life, of worries and bills and the mechanics of work, of the doltish psychologies we have laid like a template over our lives. A dog leads his life simply and unadorned. He is who he is and his only job is to enforce that.”

The 12 stories in “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” tend to be longer, more structured and more willing than those in the first book to consider the sheer strangeness of the world and draw energy from it. The title story concerns a young pair of lovers who, after an unexpected pregnancy, lie about their age in order to get married, then move into a miserable apartment to try to start their lives. In the middle of the night, they are visited by two burglars who swear they are not escaped patients from the psychiatric clinic down the street, but aliens from a distant planet, Loan the bodies of the psychiatric patients: an intergalactic version of weather-appropriate clothing. The pair’s encounter is brief and inconclusive, but its consequences affect the rest of their lives, separately and together, in ways I’d rather leave to you to explore. It’s like Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, beer-battered in Philip K. Dick, deep-fried in Tolstoy, and served in a red plastic basket with hush puppies and coleslaw. A masterpiece, that is to say – not Watson’s only one, but arguably the one that most contradicts his others. I’d give a lot for a few more in this style.

There Is Happiness contains four stories each from Dog-Men and Aliens, including those mentioned above, as well as ten new stories, some previously published but not collected, and some previously unpublished. While it’s fair to say that the best of the first two collections are gathered here, I feel that both Aliens and Dog-Men benefit from being presented in their original, complete form, and that the new series of ten stories would have worked as a standalone third collection. If that’s not possible, why not an unabridged Collected Stories? After all, there are only 30.

“There Is Happiness” is also accompanied by four (four!) epigrams from a series of poems called “The Watson Poems” by Watson’s friend Michael Pettit, which Pettit began writing while living on Watson’s couch. He later developed the character into someone who was both Brad Watson, the author, and not. “Who would have thought, least of all he,/ that he would come into the sweet, forgiving/ light of that evening?” Pettit wrote in Hemicenturian Watson. It is not the verses themselves that I object to—they are beautiful and accomplished—but rather their over-determining presence on the doorpost of this book. This is another case of sentimentality, however well-intentioned, working against itself. Sweet tea should not be so sweet that it hurts your teeth.

All that notwithstanding, the new stories are excellent and we should be grateful to have them. “Eykelboom,” “Apology” and “Crazy Horse” are among Watson’s best works. “Crazy Horse” carries a footnote explaining that it was still in progress at the time of his death, but I can’t imagine what else he planned to do with it other than send it to his agent. “The Zookeeper and the Leopard” is an adaptation of an unfinished novel. The loose ends are more apparent here than in “Crazy Horse,” but it’s a blast nonetheless, and tantalizingly reminiscent of a return to the playful supernatural of “Aliens in the Prime of Their Life” and “The Heaven of Mercury.” The zookeeper, a drunk, releases a leopard as part of an ill-conceived plan to humiliate the local animal rights officer who recently seduced his wife. The leopard promptly kills and eats his hated prison guard. As the animal explores its newfound freedom, it defecates parts of the keeper, whose vestigial consciousness registers the kind of, er, change he has undergone. A note from Watson to himself included in the text reads: “Other parts of the keeper’s consciousness will be in other piles of feces, disappearing in the larger ones and barely present in the smaller ones, until they have all decayed and he is gone.” I’m sorry we’ll never know where this was going. But Pettit is right in one of his quoted poems: “Watson/ the eternal work in progress and…”

Justin Taylor is a writer for Book World magazine and is most recently the author of the novel “Restart.”

WW Norton. 288 pages. $29.99