However, during his distinguished career Styron, who died in 2006 at 81, never fully embraced the short story. His first posthumous collection, “The Suicide Run,’’ which draws on the author’s experiences as a Marine in the latter stages of World War II, shows an author working through the conventions of the form.
Punctuated with flashes of brilliance, many of the five pieces, written over a period of decades, beg to be developed more fully. In fact, the publisher notes that at least two of the vignettes were fragments from unfinished novels, an acknowledgement made apparent in their thematic depth and richness of character development.
“Blankenship’’ (1953) focuses on a warrant officer in charge of a military prison. Charles Blankenship, who “gave the impression of cool coordinated strength,’’ struggles to maintain discipline among the “yardbirds,’’ especially when a particularly indignant new prisoner arrives. Despite an abundance of military cliches, Styron neatly delineates the tension between the officer’s need for decorum and his desire to unleash his barely concealed rage at any insubordination.
Another frustrated soldier narrates the longer piece, “Marriott, the Marine’’ (1971). Called back to service on the eve of his first novel’s publication, the narrator laments the rigidity of life on the military base, longing to take up a Bohemian existence in Greenwich Village.
Soon he meets Paul Marriott, a fellow soldier inclined to classic literature, and is struck with “boozy wonderment of . . . a man of formidable experience who had managed to find in the muted and lilac-scented province of nineteenth-century France harmonies that were compatible with a career in the deafening, bloody universe of modern warfare.’’ He’s ultimately disappointed when Marriott is revealed as just another dutiful, toe-the-line functionary.
