In 1999, Oprah anointed Bret Lott a Real Writer by selecting his novel Jewel for the Oprah Book Club. Freed from financial worries, the previously unsuccessful Lott could now spend his days at his desk, struggling to make sentences out of "words swirling about him in absurd order, words lined up like drunken soldiers, like harlots with painted lips slurring just as drunkenly as those soldiers he'd thought up."

The stories in Lott's new book, The Difference Between Women and Men, from which those swirling words are taken, depict a world full of women and men who are deeply estranged. In "A Way Through This," a husband insists to his wife that they can get through their difficulties together. He thinks that she agrees with him: "He smiled, astonished at his luck, at the blessing of a wife who could see alongside him the way through this." Meanwhile she is imagining a world without him: "And above everything hung a bright and huge morning sky, a brilliant sky filled with limitless possibilities. … He was gone, vanished into thin air, and she smiled, astonished at her luck, at the blessing of a husband who knew when to leave." Words are incapable of reconciling these drastically different versions of reality. In the title story, a desperate wife responds to her husband's demand that they discuss "the difference between women and men" by silently stacking all of the bedroom furniture in one corner of the room, a symbolic gesture which reduces him to mystified speechlessness.

Actually the gesture mystifies me too. Lott's prose is so apocalyptically awful that it resists interpretation. Here, for example, is the heroine of "Rose," who has just given her unfaithful husband a postcoital glass of bourbon with poison in it: "She had reached to him, taken the glass from him before he might drop it and spoil these sheets, desecrate them with alcohol when they had been so blessed with the beginning of love only moments before, the two still beneath these sheets as all who have loved with a love as deep as she had begun to know ought still to be." (Lott should probably try reading his sentences out loud, a technique I recommend to my freshman comp students, not that they ever actually do it.) And then there is the unnamed narrator of the story "Postscript," who is trying to write even though his wife keeps interrupting him. He just cannot "get these lost and swirling words in line before him in some sort of order so that they might bow to him, might surrender to him perhaps a moon over a midnight lake, that lake flat and black and clean, the surface so smooth that next there might come a second moon just beneath the first, a moon descending into its own black sky, this lake, the higher its sister moon rose over this lake of words he wanted smoothed for him."

Unsnarling these syntactical tangles isn't easy, but the reader who persists will see a pattern slowly emerge. Almost every story involves the kind of disasters common to this fallen existence: car crashes, heart attacks, overdue mortgages, bankruptcy, accidental electrocution (well, that last is probably not so common). But the true catastrophe in Lott's fictional universe is that husbands and wives are always at odds, warring with each other even as their lives collapse around them. The battle of the sexes is the center of his world's fallenness. And if men and women could simply put their differences aside, a new world might dawn.

Consider the story "An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse." The narrator drives home one evening, gloomily contemplating the looming bankruptcy of his company, and finds that his lights and water have been cut off. The family credit cards have been cancelled. The bank has put a lien on the house. And his wife—madly packing a suitcase in the bedroom—tells him that she's having an affair.

But redemption is near. His wife suddenly collapses into regret: "'I was lying. I'm not having an affair,' she wept. 'I would never do that to you. I just want you to cherish me.'" He holds her and whispers, "I cherish you."

With that, the apocalypse begins to unspool itself. The credit card company calls, apologizes for having made a mistake, and promises to restore their credit. The bank reverses the lien. The narrator is filled with a sudden peace: "Water flowed, light fell. What more could he ask?" Get rid of the hostility between men and women, and the world moves decisively toward redemption. It's an attractive idea, but there's one problem with it: Lott has his evil in the wrong place.

Compare Lott's story "Everything Cut Will Come Back" and Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," to which it pays homage. (The blurb at the front of Lott's book tells us that his stories have "echoes" of Flannery O'Connor, lest we miss the connection.) In "Everything Cut Will Come Back," the unnamed narrator finds himself brought face to face with the inexplicable evil of his parents' death in a car crash. He looks at his wife, sitting in his living room, and thinks that he must get away from her in order to make sense of the catastrophe. So he starts his car and drives for hours. Finally he realizes that his only hope of surviving the disaster is to go back. "I saw [my parents]," he muses at the story's end,

saw their hands together, and saw, too, love. The road lay before me, a narrow violet ribbon through the hills … and I knew that whatever way I went, whichever turn I took, that road would lead me home. I just had to be careful, to stay awake, to let the road be the road, and me the traveler on it, though there was in this realization no lesson from my parents' having lost their lives by leaving the road. Only that mine wasn't over yet, that the road before me was ready to take me where I was loved, and where I loved. And I drove.

The persistent reader, having disentangled this particular knot of commas and gerunds, will realize that Lott is again offering a vision of sin and redemption; his narrator can dig in his toes and remain in a warped relationship, where his wife is no comfort to him, or he can find peace and understanding by returning to love.

Flannery O'Connor, who has apparently understood Genesis, realizes that the battle of the sexes is a symptom of the fall rather than its source. In "Everything That Rises Must Converge," a white mother and son ride together on an integrated bus line. The son, Julian, is resentful of his mother and embarrassed by her racism. He watches her give a small black child a penny, and then laughs when the child's mother turns in fury and shouts, "He don't take nobody's pennies!" As the black woman stalks away, Julian lashes out at his own mother:

"That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure," he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), "it looked better on her than it did on you. … The old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn."

Shocked and frightened, the old woman has a stroke. Julian runs for help that he cannot find: "His feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow." The surface conflict in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is between man and woman, mother and son; but the real evil is in Julian's own soul. His eyes are opened to his own sin, the self-righteousness which is as filthy and destructive as his mother's hateful racism.

Paradoxically, Lott's less drastic vision of sin makes the relationship between the sexes that much more fraught. If the hostility between the sexes is at the center of life's fallenness, then the relationship between men and women must be endlessly policed. The recent screaming and yelling over Lawrence Summer's relatively mild suggestion that women might be hardwired differently from men reveals just this mindset. If hatred between men and women is indeed the original sin, anyone who tries to insist on fundamental differences between the sexes is inching close to heresy.

O'Connor's pitiless analysis of the sin within each soul opens the way for supernatural redemption. All that Lott's stories offer me, in contrast, is the forlorn hope that the mess will straighten itself out, if we can just learn to get along.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Norton) and is working on a four-volume history of the world, also for Norton.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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