Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

The title story sets the book's real subject: a girl named Rhoda, furious and disruptive on the day World War II ends, terrorizes her fifth-grade class by faking a fainting spell and holding the whole school hostage to her performance. Rhoda Manning recurs across several stories here, at different ages, and Gilchrist never redeems her into likability, she stays vain, competitive, and self-dramatizing from grade school through a bad marriage, and the collection's real achievement is finding that unlikability worth fourteen stories.

Gilchrist's other heroines, Nora Jane Whittington robbing a New Orleans bar in "Rich," LeLe Arnold navigating a summer of first romance and family scandal in "Summer, an Elegy," share Rhoda's basic refusal to perform the contrition Southern fiction usually assigns its wayward women. Bad marriages, wartime homefronts, and reckless affairs run through nearly every story without producing a single character who apologizes for wanting more than she's been given.

The collection's comedy is inseparable from its cruelty: Gilchrist writes catastrophe, a suicide attempt, a fatal car crash, a family fortune squandered, in the same brisk, gossipy register she uses for a bridge game or a beauty pageant, so that the reader's laughter keeps getting interrupted by how much damage these women are actually causing and absorbing. That tonal whiplash, comic surface over real wreckage, is what won the book its 1984 National Book Award.

Most coming-of-age fiction uses a character's flaws as material to be corrected by experience; Gilchrist's Rhoda stories deliberately withhold that arc. The girl who fakes fainting to control her classmates in the title story grows into an adult who manipulates her husband and her own children with the same theatrical entitlement, and Gilchrist offers no scene of comeuppance to reassure the reader that Rhoda has been taught anything. The joke, and the risk, is that she remains exactly herself.

Several stories, particularly Nora Jane's, root themselves specifically in New Orleans's French Quarter bar culture rather than the plantation-adjacent Mississippi Delta setting more familiar from Southern fiction, giving Gilchrist's women a looser, more bohemian range of options than Faulkner's or O'Connor's heroines ever had. That geography matters: a woman can rob a bar and disappear into a new identity here in a way she couldn't in a smaller, more watchful town.