THE GETAWAY

A literary archaeological dig turns up little that will be of interest to most.

An introduction explains that Thomas (1898–1990) was a fairly well-known writer of the 1930s, publishing two books with Knopf and several stories in The American Mercury, The New Yorker, and Harper’s. Today, says Pappas, “only ardent readers of Nebraska fiction or the short story form. . . remember Thomas,” but she goes on to declare that, due to a new archive at the Lincoln library, “a renewed interest in Thomas’s writing can now be sustained.” Thomas’s 12 stories themselves are elegantly composed (on the whole) and make an earnest attempt to capture everyday life in Depression-era heartland. In “Grandma Hotel Adams,” the title character defies her children by marrying a shiftless younger man, while one of “The Steckley Girls” tries to prevent the other’s longtime boyfriend from running off. Thomas’s characters are eccentric but never too much so, and her descriptions of place stop short of being memorable. Pappas identifies “The Getaway” as being the Thomas story that was the most “critically accepted.” It describes the attempt of a young woman to run away to Kansas City with her lover, a scheme thwarted by her little son’s trying to come along. After the lover—who didn’t even know she had any children—drives away in panic, Mrs. Riggs simply shrugs it off and thinks about what to cook for dinner. To the jaded eye of today, it may seem a preternaturally uninteresting story, but “Thomas reports that New Yorker editor Harold Ross told her, as she stood talking with Somerset Maugham at a cocktail party, that her story “‘The Getaway’ was ‘the best damn story ever to appear in the New Yorker.’”

Well intentioned, but mainly of historical interest.