Diane Oliver was a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop when she died in a motorcycle crash at age 22. Before her death in 1966, she published four stories in such journals as the Sewanee Review. It’s hard to know what brilliance she might have bestowed on the world had she lived longer, but the newly published collection “Neighbors and Other Stories” provides some inkling. Oliver’s perceptive, insightful work reflects great talent and ambition. The ease and elegance of her prose are striking, as is her faith in her readers’ intelligence – the certainty that they will see glints of subtext without the need for explication.

Oliver’s characters – primarily Black women in the American South during the era of the Civil Rights Movement – must often rely on silence and implication. In “Traffic Jam,” Libby, one of the few characters to appear in multiple stories, shows up for work at Mrs. Nelson’s house only to endure her employer’s invasive, personal questions and ill-conceived advice. “Libby nodded her head the way she always did, mumbled something that sounded like ‘yes, ma’am,’ and busied herself arranging the kitchen curtains until she was certain Mrs. Nelson had left the room.”

Review

Grove

“Neighbors and Other Stories”
By Diane Oliver
Grove. 272 pages.
$27

In this seemingly understated moment, Oliver develops both character and setting. She shows that Libby has a method for managing Mrs. Nelson safely, without truly engaging. And her response – “something that sounded like ‘yes, ma’am,’” – adheres to social rules, though she keeps her actual words to herself, affording her a sliver of privacy. There is an echo of this self-possession in “Before Twilight,” after four friends stage a sit-in at a tea room. When a police officer asks, “Who put you kids up to this?” the response from one of the four is, “Nobody,” followed by a pause “to make noticeable his omission of ‘sir.’”

The policeman calls the sit-in participants “kids,” while Reverend Honeycutt, the “little black man” who appears at the jail to secure their release, greets them, “Good evening, children.” He adds: “The officer tells me you children are a little confused. I told him you all weren’t doing nothing but playing games.” The word “children” appears seven times in a single scene, becoming a kind of plea for mercy.

Oliver gives most of her characters children. In the case of college-bound women who are not parents, their days are still full of child care, tending to their younger siblings. Their mothers work, as Oliver beautifully describes it, in a “world of pots and pans and narrow back doors.”

There is no need to rank the heartache among these pages, but surely a moment in the titular story would rise to the top of any list. Ellie has finished bathing her younger brother, Tommy, who is preparing to integrate his local school in the morning. As she begins to dress him for bed, Tommy asks, “Are they gonna get me tomorrow?” Ellie deflects with a joke, but hours later the house is attacked, and the family is on the floor, surrounded by broken glass. Tommy and Ellie’s parents debate whether to send Tommy to school. “How we are going to tell him we’re afraid of them?” their father says.

Oliver rarely expounds on who her characters’ antagonists are; often, she uses only pronouns. Here is Jenny in “Before Twilight,” reflecting on the loss of her father: “Sometimes when she was thinking by herself, she wondered how her mother could forgive them for not sending the ambulance right away and then carrying him right past the big hospital to reach the one that would take him.”

Several stories stand out either stylistically or thematically. The hint of defiance and menace in the title of “Mint Juleps Not Served Here” foreshadows a surprising bolt of violence (though violence erupts in other stories as well). “Frozen Voices” is an atypically long, kaleidoscopic, sensory-driven work; “Spiders Cry Without Tears,” about an interracial relationship, covers a greater span of time than most of its fellows.

Oliver carefully documents the exhausting nature of domestic labor, but she depicts idleness – in “The Visitor” and “Spiders Cry Without Tears” – as having its own painful qualities. In “The Visitor,” Alice, a doctor’s wife, silently bemoans her efforts to impress her peers (and manage her great distaste for her stepdaughter): “Lies, lies, they were the center of her life.”

Oliver is curious about the line between deceiving oneself and harboring hope. Nora’s family in “Key to the City,” for instance, takes a bus from Still Creek, Ga., to Chicago, hoping that her absent father will greet them there. It swiftly becomes clear that he will not. When Nora asks her mother, “Did you know all the time?” she receives this answer: “I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.” As in other moments throughout this collection, Oliver imbues this one with a kind of sorrowful determination, a dignified uncertainty.