[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: J.D. Salinger

1961, Little, Brown & Company

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

I suspect many of you have already read this book, either because it was assigned in school way back when, or because gobbling up J.D. Salinger is an American teen rite of passage. I, it shames me a little to admit, never did. But now I have. Good on me.

This is going to be a real brief review, and not even much of a review. More of like a signpost point to why you should read this. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s superbly written. I guess that’s about the sum of it. I’ll go on though.

Franny and Zooey is comprised two short stories (originally published in the New Yorker—in fact, there’s a bunch of good Salinger in their archives, like the novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, unpublished outside the magazine) attached together. As a whole, it makes up about 100 pages and 5 scenes.

Most of the action involves Zooey (his real name is Zachary) spouting from a soapbox to his sister, Franny, or his mother, Bessie, about his sister. Franny is suffering from what would now probably be called a quarter-life crisis. She finds herself halted by spiritual and existential confusion, unable to remove herself from her parents’ couch. Zooey has plenty of opinions on this—and life in general.

The siblings are the youngest of seven precocious and genius children, who grew up on academic tests and regular appearances on a radio quiz show known as “It’s a Wise Child.” They are smarter than most of the world around them, a gift that comes with the price of dissatisfaction with their role in the larger world, depression derived from living amongst perceived mediocrity.  It’s a realization that no matter who you are, you are a very small piece in a much larger whole, and the need to accept that. Franny wants to partake in the world without feeling let down with its banality. It seems the challenge Salinger is putting out there for Franny to face is how to love the world for what it is without condescending to it.

This sentiment is crushing the young Franny; it’s one Zooey is aware of and actively tackling/evading. If you can’t or won’t cope (remain a “freak” as Zooey puts it), it can have effects such as reclusion or suicide, as evidenced by two of their brothers. It’s a sentiment felt at one time or another by (I’m guessing) most every teenager and young adult that ever had half a brain. Because of this, Franny and Zooey is not unlike Salinger’s masterpiece, Catcher in the Rye. The situation might not be the same, but the subject at hand, and the characters delivering it, are supremely relatable to readers of a certain age.

That’s not to say this is merely a kid’s book; nor is it YA. It can speak to a broader audience. I’m not a teenager any longer, but I still tore through this book in record time. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go back and read it again in the very near future. Franny and Zooey is a fun and funny and interesting read. It’s a gread read. So give it a shot.

Similar Reads: The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), A Zoo Story (Albee), On the Road (Kerouac), The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway)

Author:

Ecco, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Ron Rash excels at creating haunting, affecting portraits of emotion. They don’t often twist, and they don’t often surprise, but at their best (like his most recent novel, Serena, which I loved), they can be darkly riveting.

The short stories in Burning Bright—and they are quite short—largely rely on their premises. If the emotional territory he stakes out is rich enough to yield pay dirt in only a dozen or so pages, these too can be as compelling as Serena.

Rash manages that feat in only a third of the stories here. The rest of the time, unfortunately, there’s simply something missing.

Burning Bright is divided into two sections of six stories each. The first sextet deal almost exclusively with down-on-their-luck characters, as they defend what little they have, try to scratch out a bit of something extra, or lament what they’ve lost. In other words, “Hard Times,” which is both the title of the first story and a fair description of the subject matter of all six.

“Hard Times” deals with a poor couple during the Depression who are getting their eggs stolen out from under their. They suspect the even poorer family up the way, and then the husband accuses the wife of driving away their grown children. She argues that survival is most important during hard times, and she taught her kids how to do that, at least. That’s it, and it never really feels dramatic—maybe because the Depression is worse than anything these people are doing to each other.

By contrast, stories from Burning Bright‘s second half use economic hardship as a backdrop instead of a foundation, and find more compelling situations to focus on.

For instance, “Falling Star”—my favorite in the whole book—is about a simple, not-too-smart cement pourer, whose wife is getting a college degree. The pourer loves his wife intensely, but she’s just not around enough anymore, and his dealing with that frustration and jealousy makes for a heartwrenching story. Rash’s best work isn’t so complicated it’s hard to follow, but neither is it so simple as to be summed up in a two-word phrase.

In all these stories, Rash excels at description and homespun dialogue. One example, from “Hard Times”:

“What’s the why of you asking that?” he said. The words were neither angry nor defensive. It struck Jacob that even the man’s voice had been worn down to a bare-boned flatness.

Here’s another one, from the grave-robbing story “Confederate Dead”:

“You leave that truck by the river and the worst gossip on your buddy there is he was fool enough to get drunk and fall in. You bring the law here they’ll know him for a grave robber. Which way you notion his kin would rather recollect him?”

Unfortunately, that talent for an authentic country feel isn’t enough to float the collection.

The low point of Burning Bright is a piece with good prose called “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars.” In it, a woman named Ruth had lost her child four hours after it was born. Her husband wanted to have another baby, but she adamantly refused to move on from her child’s death; eventually she and her husband separated. Later a biologist tells her a story about how parakeets won’t fly away when one of their flock dies, and they can be easily exterminated because of that.

In this story and a few like it, I found myself saying, “I get it, I get it,” long before the story was over. This one in particular reads like it shouldn’t have been included in the collection3.

Another good one, for contrast, is “The Corpse Bird,” in which a man from a blue-collar family struggles to live among his white-collar neighbors. He was the first in his family to go to college, the first to have an indoor job. But the superstitions of his family, an uneducated bunch who lived “by the signs,” are engraved deep in his psyche. When he spies what he thinks is a harbinger of death trying to kill a neighbor’s child, it makes for great drama.

Rash’s talent for haunting emotional portraiture finds its wheelhouse when he’s dealing with internally tortured characters, people whose conflicts with themselves are greater than any challenge they face from others. It’s too bad that happens in less than half these stories.

I’m eagerly anticipating Rash’s next novel, where he’ll have the space to get into his characters’ heads a little more. Until then, the four good stories in this collection aren’t really worth the cover price. Get it from the library and read the second half.

Similar books: Close Range, by Annie Proulx; Gallatin Canyon, by Thomas McGuane; Serena, by Ron Rash

Author: Wells Tower

Picador, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned grabbed me by the nuts in the very first paragraph of the first story, “Brown Coast,” as Bob Munroe wakes up covered in Saltines:

Cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

To escape from a busted marriage and a lost job, Munroe holes up in his uncle’s beach house in an unnamed, rinky-dink town. Here he accidentally and grudgingly makes friends with Derrick, the local vet (“Gotta take a ride over the bridge,” he said. “Need to go pull something out of a horse’s pussy”). Derrick’s wife, Claire, is so fetching that her beauty “made [Bob’s] throat itch,” and Tower makes it clear that Bob and Claire will eventually exchange fluids.

Meanwhile, back at home, Bob’s wife is spending an awful lot of time with Bob’s uncle, the man who suggested the beach house for Bob’s getaway.

In a vain effort to create something beautiful out of this mess, Bob begins filling a massive fish tank with colorful creatures he pulls from the sea, and for awhile, it works. Bob gets his head together enough to decide that he will go back home and make up with his wife. But then Claire drops a sea cucumber into the fish tank. When Bob wakes the next morning (“Claire was snoring hard”), he finds all of the fish dead.

Claire tells him that they’ll find new fish, “Way better stuff than even what you had” … which is Tower’s ingenious way of letting the reader know that Bob will never reunite with his family.

I know I’m spending a lot of time on this one story, but it’s a dynamite story (Paris Review thought so, too), and made me really want to read the rest.

The next piece, “Retreat,” has a similar protagonist with a similar voice.

The next piece, “Executor of Important Energies,” has a similar protagonist with a similar voice.

The next piece, “Down Through the Valley,” …

And so on. They’re entertaining stories, nearly every one of them. Taken alone, they’re each delightful. But put together, one after another after another, they begin to blend together into one long piece. (Until the last two, which I’ll get to).

Which is fine. Again, they’re fun to read, and Tower has a gift for dialogue. “Executors of Important Energies” opens with Burt getting a late-night call from his lonely, sex-deprived stepmother:

“Do you ever think about all the ones who you didn’t let them have you? I wish I could take a do-over on all of them, even the nastiest. Even the worst. Are you there?”

“Yes, “I said. “I’m just not sure what you want me to do with this information.”

“Oh, forget it,” she said. “I just don’t feel very desirable is all.”

I told her plenty of people desired her. “Well, nobody desires me to my face,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Not bad. Like three here.”

Dialogue like this was enough to keep me reading through these first seven pieces. The last two? Well, that’s a whole different story.

Remember those old SAT math questions, the ones where you have to deduce the pattern? The stories in this collection go: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, x, y.

x is the eighth piece, “On the Show.” Instead of 128, though, this one follows no pattern whatsoever. A pedophile sneaks a child into a Port-A-John. A young man has a fistfight with his stepfather and runs away to join a traveling fair. A man ducks and dodges his way through a Scrambler-type ride to pick up the loose change that falls from the pockets of riders. A baseball team leaves town to hold spring training in New Mexico instead. It’s a bizarre piece, a misstep with a sketchy rotating point of view. Harper’s saw fit to publish it, though. Makes me wonder who’s in charge over there.

The ninth and final story, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, also steps out of the pattern set by the first seven, but this one reads much better than “On the Show.” It follows a marauding band of Vikings (yes, Vikings—some of them with consciences) who cross the North Sea, mostly out of boredom, to attack a settlement it had already destroyed the prior autumn:

On the far hill, I could make out the silhouette of the monastery, which still lacked a roof from when we’d burned it last. It was a lovely place, and I hoped there would still be something left to enjoy after we got off the ship and wrecked it up.

The dialogue in this story is brilliant. One man doesn’t want to go crusading, “Not until I hear the particulars.” During the attack, while most of the Vikings are off raping and burning and cutting off heads, a splinter group of middle-aged Vikings comes across “an old dried-up farmer”:

He squinted at my face. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

“Just thought I recognized you is all.”

“Could be. I was through here last fall.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Now that was a hot one.”

And a bit later:

“So what are you doing, any looting?”

“Why? You got anything to loot?”

“Me? Oh, no. Got a decent cookstove, but I can’t see you toting that back on the ship.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a coin hoard or anything buried out back?”

“Jeezum crow, I wish I did have. Coin hoard, I’d really turn things around for myself.”

A common criticism of story collections is that they are “uneven.” Excepting these last two pieces, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is just the opposite, a bit too even. Wells Tower is a good writer. He will probably soon be a very good writer. But in order for him to become a great writer, he’ll need to find some versatility.

I’m pretty sure he will.

Similar books: Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson are the first collections that come to mind. Tower also shows shades of Robert Stone, although his writing is much less erudite. Bear and His Daughter is a good one by Stone, or check out Nico’s review of Stone’s recent release, Fun With Problems, a book I haven’t gotten my grubby little hands on yet.

Edited by John Joseph Adams

2008, Nightshade Books

Filed Under Sci-Fi, Short Stories

It’s tough to review an anthology, seeing as A.) there are myriad voices and styles in a single book B.) the selection are chosen because they are exempletive of something and presumably so because they are good or the best at whatever they were selected for C.) despite this, some entries are inevitably better than others, and it’s hard to score the whole thing without undercutting some and giving others too much credit. So, with that said, my score for this is an attempt to quantify my overall impression of this book, so take from it what you will.

I don’t read too much of this kind of sci-fi, or many sci-fi short stories at all for that matter, but when I saw the roster of authors contributing to this collection I had to pick it up. It’s got writers from all sorts of genres, from sci-fi (Paolo Bacigalupi) and fantasy (George R. R. Martin) to horror (Stephen King) to whatever genre you consider Jonathan Lethem implicated in. Here’s a link to the full list so you can see what I mean.

So, this has a diverse collection of stories. I particularly liked those that took an unique stance on the apocalype. That is, the ones that weren’t set in a Mad Max-ian world, or if they were, those that recognized and played with the clichés in which they worked. “The End of the World As We Know It” by Dale Bailey is a perfect example of this. It always remains aware of itself and the genre around it, allowing a lot of cool meta-fictional elements ooze out of a story that would still be entertaining without it. The stories by Lethem and John Langan, as well as a few of the others in the collection have this similar literary playfulness that really appealed to me.

The Mad Max-ish stories were good too. “Salvage” by Orson Scott Card and “The People of Sand and Slag” by Bacigalupi worked directly within this realm (you know, everyone mostly lives in the desert, because for whatever reason, most of Earth is a desert now; supplies are limited and salvaging remnants of the the late-20th and early-21st century is of the utmost importance; humanity has semi-evolved, either culturally or physically or both into something new and different), but they were still wildly entertaining, and without them this collection would have a gaping void. My favorite was “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” by Neil Barrett, Jr. I This is mostly because it requires us to accept anthropomorphic animals without explanation, which almost always works for me (I’m a sucker for some things).

There are quite a few very original takes on the end of days included in this collection too. Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth” tells of computer geeks who run mainframes trying to keep the internet functioning and through it re-establish government order while a plague wipes out those not locked in clean rooms. Martin’s cave dweller story, “Dark, Dark Were The Tunnels” is a great sci-fi/fantasy read. And “Mute” by Gene Wolf is a brilliant story about two children whose parents never come home, and is probably the most literary and thought provoking of the collection. I read it twice.

All in all, books like this are great for commutes, or to have waiting by your couch or bed for a quick pickup story. There’s not a single entry in this compilation that I hated, and there are many that I liked immensely. There are clichés in here for sure, but they are fun ones. And as much as I love zombie stories, I can say that I was pretty happy none showed up in this book. That’s an anthology for another day.

Similar Reads: The Road (McCarthy), Steampunk (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, eds.), Z for Zachariah (O’Brien), The Walking Dead series (Kirkman & Moore/Adlard). The story in this collection titled “Mute” by Gene Wolf reminded me of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden.  Also, there is a comprehensive sub-genre recommended reading list appended to the end of the book.

Akashic Books, 2009

Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery

The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city.

Authors in this collection range from immediately recognizable names like Stewart O’Nan and Dan Lee to writers like J. Itabari, who is making her fiction debut in the book. Lehane also included himself in the collection. An editor selecting him or herself for their own collection is usually frowned upon, but as a reader and writer of crime fiction Lehane realizes his omission from a collection of Boston noir would be a glaring one, and his story is a standout.

As any resident of Boston knows, the boundaries of our city are flexible, and extend far beyond downtown. Lehane places stories from the areas more Boston than the common: Southie, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain. But Lehane also traces the social geography our city’s inhabitants know well: the tribal locals, the mystified transplants, the wise-guys longing for the simple and brutal yesterday being erased by gentrification. He shows us the rough past of the north end in “Femme Sole”, a story set in 1745. The anger and confusion and guilt and shame revolving around the priest sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese is explored in all its complexity in John Dufresne’s “The Cross-Eyed Bear.” The commuter mentality is captured perfectly in Lynne Heitman’s story of a woman struggling to break through the glass ceiling in the financial district during the week and who spends her weekends far, far away.

In his intro to this collection Lehane sets himself an ambitious goal. “One of the recurrent themes of Noir has always been the search for a home,” Lehane writes. “Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it -however fruitless that goal might turn out to be- is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.” The worst of these stories are great noir tales in their own right that evoke the city in a paint-by-numbers fashion (throw in a Red Sox hat here, a view of the Prudential Center there, and, of course, a healthy amount of “wicked,” and your story is set in Boston). In the best, the city itself is acting upon the musician from New York now living in the Back Bay, or the single mother relocated to the suburbs, and becomes the unseen protagonist in the story.

The only fault I find with this collection is that despite the breadth of locations and characters, there seems to be an obvious omission. Lehane writes of the feeling of loss experienced in a “less violent and beiger city”, one being calmed and tamed by progress. Yet we are not presented stories seen from the side of the other. In a city with more students than pigeons, we never enter a campus—high school or college. The collection is free of entitled yuppies, another Boston mainstay. The “beigers” themselves, the affluent upwardly-mobile, the mid-thirties restaurateurs pushing into the south end, the hipsters painting murals over the graffiti in Somerville and Jamaica Plain, and the tourists being guided through the park by a man dressed as Ben Franklin are absent. The part of the city the locals roll their eyes at, but cannot disavow, is not represented. We don’t necessarily need a story to take place on a Mega Super Duck Tour, but it wouldn’t be Boston without hearing their ubiquitous quack.

The idea of setting as a major character in this collection interests me because so much of the idea of Noir is tied up in setting, from Chandler’s Los Angeles to the mean streets of New York. The Noir series has already mined some of the most obvious choices like The Bronx, Chicago, D.C., Havana, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, among others. Now, though, the series is dipping into territory that does not readily lend itself to noir fiction: Richmond, Pheonix, “Indian County,” Trinidad. Trinidad noir? I’m intrigued. Lehane suggests that noir is more than skuzzy people acting skuzzily, and as the series moves away from the more familiar locations I think we will see the definition of noir stretched in new ways. Delaware Noir? Maine Noir? Saskatchewan Noir? I don’t know what those collections would look like, but I can’t wait to find out.

Read these books: Nobody Move (Johnson), Inherent Vice (Pynchon), Shutter Island (Lehane), Moose Noir (Palin)

For the record,  my favorite, favorite book ever and a book I truly think any reader should drop everything for is Lolita. But I’ve harped on it on this site again and again already. I read a lot of books, though, and there are a ton I think every reader should read. Steven Millhauser has written a number of these and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories is my favorite of his. Read it now.

Millhauser was one of a handful of excellent professors I had in college, so I’m a little biased. If you’re reading this site, I’d be a little surprised you’ve never heard of him. But if somehow you haven’t read him, you should. He is undeniably one of the most precise and imaginative writers writing today. He is a fabulist and a natural storyteller with a knack for writing stories that are at once cerebral and accessible.

The stories in this book cover a range of themes and styles. The opening number is written in the first person plural–keeping a story with a faceless “we” narrator contained is no easy task–and Millhauser handles this mode with as much confidence and finesse as Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides. He uses this perspective in a few other stories in this collection as well. In fact, one of my favorite stories, “Beneath the Cellars of Our Town,” is told from the collective voice of a town that decides to relocate itself to a series of underground passageways and become mole people.

That’s one of the zanier premises in the book. The zaniest story of all, “A Visit,” also happens to be my favorite. How out there is it? Well, it’s about a guy who drives to New England to stay the weekend with his old college roommate and his friend’s new wife, who happens to be a two-foot-tall bullfrog.

These stories are so great not because they are wild and out there, but because of the tremendous restraint Millhauser shows while working within the fantastic. He writes in a serious tone always: his narrators don’t spin yarns, they put their lives to paper. Millhauser makes sure the perfect details are captured in every story (but this doesn’t mean every detail: look for the screwdriver with the yellow handle in “A Visit” and you’ll understand what I mean).

Not every story is as on the fringe as these. Millhauser’s most identifiable stories feature realities that subtly diverge from our own. A dedicated master, such as Heinrich in “The New Automation Theater,” creates the impossible, or a group of characters, like the audience in the eponymous story, experience–and accept–something beyond the normal boundary of reality.

Any reader who enjoys short stories and literary fiction has probably come across Millhauser at some point. If you haven’t, get on that now, starting with The Knife Thrower. His other books are great too (all of them), so any is a great place to start reading this American master. Read this book now.

Read these too: Anything else by Millhauser, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Shepard), Leaf Storm (García Márquez), Book of Wonder (Dunsany)

Author: Steve Almond

2010 (self-published)

Filed Under Literary, Short Stories, Nonfiction

(Note: to the best of my knowledge this book is only available through on-demand publishing via an Espresso Book Machine. There is one at the Harvard Bookstore)

This is a tiny little book, split into two parts of about 40 small pages each. It really won’t take but a minute to read, well, maybe an hour. One side is titled “Essays” and the other “Stories” and they are flipped 180 degrees, so neither (or both I guess) comes first. There are three separate covers to choose from, and Almond has already revised it once since the initial printing. I think I’m a fan of this new fangled on demand printing thing.

Seeing as I really only know of Almond as a fiction writer (I very much enjoyed his 2005 collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories), I opted to open with the “Stories” half first.  These are all short shorts, none longer than 4-5 paragraphs. There’s no plot thread connecting these and not much of a thematic line. Short shorts aren’t really a form I’m all that into. I read it like I do poetry, mostly for language and not so much for substance. I enjoyed these, but it’s not really the type of thing I tend to go back to. Almond is a talented writer, and the language is quite good:

This is where the cranes come to sleep, the ripped out yard-by-gravel mile between the bus terminal and the freeway still unconstructed, its fading gray ramps into nothing. They bundle here under night, clanking, steel thread and iron, the hard things of this world. Neglected by their soft owners, the cranes huddles and murmur old jokes, somber, worn, from the duties of lifting and sniffing on each other the perfume of oil going black. They know not to nod their giant necks, not to run their hooks against loose rebar. This is the hour of rest, when nothing is built or remembered. The wind through their loose parts is idle syncopation and notes whistle up, a song made with every measure of grace, as where honest labor has been done and fellowship means beast and machine. Sleep, good citizens, it is not yours to hear this sweet offering.

The “Essays” side of the book is the one I’d assumed I’d like less. Almond, however, surprised me with one of the best guides to writing I’ve come across to date.

Unlike the stories, Almond’s essays follow a sequence of questions and answers, almost as if he’s inserting his own responses into a writerly catechism.  It’s really written for students (enrolled in a program or otherwise) of writing. But anyone who entertains writing fiction or is interested at all in the writing process should defintiely give this a read. And, speaking from many dreadful workshop experiences: writing teachers should read this, as well as a few of the books I’ve suggested below.

Almond’s now-recognizable voice comes through especially clear in these essays. He reminds me a lot of George Saunders: biting and sarcastic and a little insane, yet undeniably wise. He writes in a funny yet serious tone that screams authority but doesn’t demand it. Writers should read this book, and everybody should read Steve Almond.

Similar Reads: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut), On Writing (King), Eats, Shoots, & Leaves (Truss), The Evil B.B. Chow (Almond), The Braindead Megaphone (Saunders)

Author: Robert Stone

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

In this collection, Stone is at his best when he’s dallying. Whether it’s an old lush sitting around, freaking people out, or a foolhardy suburban warrior stumbling drug-addled toward some quixotic goal, Stone excels at the second act. He runs into problems after that.

For most of these stories, Stone uses an odd pattern to build twisting, dogleg plots. We start with a man, a lawyer or a writer or a professor, who’s an incorrigible womanizer and a drunk or a druggie. After a length of time establishing a premise (and dallying magnificently), the story veers off in some wild way and leaves that premise—and often the main character—behind.

Sometimes the veering off involves a new point of view, sometimes a new location, sometimes an entire set of new characters. A couple of the stories here, most notably the title piece, “Fun With Problems,” succeed (more or less) with their cutback plot twists. More often, though, the narrative runs off the track, gets lost, and then lays down and dies.

So, while Stone’s writing, and especially his dialogue, are characteristically excellent, Fun With Problems is unsatisfying because the stories’ arcs so often bewilderingly abandon their first halves.

In an interview in the Boston Globe about this collection, Stone says, “I was writing about some hard places of the spirit and I couldn’t seem to get these people out of the troubles they were in. I couldn’t find them the way out.”

I don’t put a lot of stake in what writers say about their own work, but in this case, Stone’s words are cuttingly honest and accurate. Frustratingly (never quite redeemingly), the troubles Stone puts his characters in are often the source of the collection’s best prose.

In “The Archer,” for example, Duffy, an unbalanced art professor with his life in ruins, flies down south to deliver a guest lecture. As his plane lands, there’s this dalliance:

As the aircraft, jammed to within a single breathing expanse of claustrophobia, swooped low over alligator-infested pastel swamp, Duffy was already thinking with loathing of the subject of his Pahoochee lecture. … The interior of the plane on landing seemed so impacted with flesh that it would have required only one neurasthenic’s psychic break to be transformed into a thrashing tube of terror, a panic-driven, southbound rat kind of tourists head for the offshore ooze.

Once Duffy arrives, there’s this:

He bent to drink from the faucet; the water tasted of baitfish and the Confederate dead. … In desperation he took a sip from his liter of booze. Nothing good came of it, neither comfort nor light.

But when it comes time for Duffy to take action instead of pontificating impotently (if sublimely) on despair and doom, Duffy can’t manage to do much of anything meaningful, and the story ends with a limp collection of failed epiphanies.

Also among the actionless is Eric Floss, the first protagonist of “The Wine-Dark Sea.” Eric, a freelance journalist, who travels to Steadman’s Island, off the coast of Connecticut, to try to report on a bizarre summit called there by the Secretary of Defense. He stays with an ex-girlfriend’s sister and her husband, and after he drunkenly mocks and argues with them (another awesome dalliance), the perspective switches to the husband, and then to the Secretary of Defense, in whose head Eric Floss is a meaningless speck in the distance. Eventually problems abound, and the story limps to an uninspired conclusion that straddles all three men, but fails to affect or move or change any of them.

In the story “Fun With Problems,” the lawyer Matthews is visiting his mentally deficient client in jail. He looks over at another inmate, a sociopath named Brand, whose visitor is an attractive young woman:

Matthews watched them. The woman was laughing at something Brand had said, and Matthews felt a rush of what he thought might be a very basic form of sexual jealousy. Here, safely confined, we had self-selected alpha man, recognizable by his readiness to snap off your digits on a whim, exchanging a few sexual signifiers with  the condescending female of the species. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the real thing.

That excellent passage is one of the best of the story, and the scene simmers with layers of tension and intense character. Soon after, however, we’re transported from the jail, and from the client and Brand, so Matthews can pursue Brand’s attractive visitor. While this story is my favorite of the collection, it too suffers from an ending that seems to belong to a different story.

I won’t go through every story in the interest of saving space, but the same goes for almost all of the other stories in Fun With Problems. In this way, a collection with more than its fair share of brilliant passages—and a writer’s clinic on dialogue—comes up short when it’s time to stop wasting time.

Similar reads: Bear and His Daughter, by Robert Stone; Gallatin Canyon, by Thomas McGuane

Author: Gao Xingjian, translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee

2004, HarperCollins

Filed under Literary, Short Stories

Gao Xingjian is apparently an important and influential Chinese literary figure. He lived through the Cultural Revolution before expatriating to France. He has since earned a Nobel Prize in Literature, for his fiction, poetry, and drama.  His stature, history, and skill are evident in his writing. However in this book they seem to overshadow the storytelling. There are only a few stories contained within this book, and none are particularly long. And while I quite enjoyed this as a collection, no one story really stands out. It’s definitely not the type of collection to pick and choose from.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather follows a consistent thematic thread. These are essentially stories about people who cannot connect, with others or with their world. In each story the characters are surrounded by many others just like themselves, and in each story there is a noticeable lack in social understanding, or even communication. Selfish egocentrism reigns, and empathy is nowhere to be found.

I am regrettably ignorant of modern Chinese culture, though I’ve read that Gao Xingjian is critical of his native society (not to be misconstrued as unloving). This book contains a lot of characters solely interested in their own selves; it is a book populated by “me”s. The main character in the title story, for instance, sees his grandfather much less as person than as a figure in his own life.

This is perhaps most noticeable in “The Accident” where people speak over the corpse of a man hit and killed by a human vehicle as if he were little more than news, thus dehumanizing him and realizing him merely as a part of their own existences. Of course this is really no different than the turned heads at an accident in any country, so Xingjian clearly isn’t criticizing solely the Chinese. The newlyweds in “The Temple” partake in one sided conversation with a villager where they are honeymooning, much as the former lovers in “In The Park” both speak at each other while neither listens.

Still, the writing is strong, with plenty of exposition that carefully dips into the emotional undercurrent of each story and utilizes descriptions efficiently:

The lid of the coffin is open and he almost guesses that the corpse in the coffin, with its head wrapped in the shroud, is himself. Apparently confused, he turns and looks around, although he doesn’t know what it is he is looking for. However, he sees behind him two big heavy doors that are half-open, and outside in the sun, on the stone steps, a little wooden bucket with peeling paint. A lizard is crawling on the stone step in front of the wooden bucket.

This is a very short collection that builds a strong emotional swell,  and well worth the read. However much of its strength resides in what the stories speak to contextually and how they work as a collection, so no singular story within stands out as particularly great. If you’re up for a collection of quick and heady short stories, definitely give this a read in a sitting or two, but if you are looking to nibble on a story or two between other readings, this may not be your best bet.

Similar reads: Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (Kawabata), Twilight of the Superheroes (Eisenberg), The Diving Pool (Ogawa)

Author: Lord Dunsany

Public Domain, 1912

Best ebook deal: free

Filed under Literary, Fantasy, Short Stories

It’s always great when a book turns out to be nothing at all what you were expecting, and all the better for it. I’d never heard of Lord Dunsany (aka Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) before, but apparently he’s a big deal in fantasy. This collection is ecclectic and creative, with stories that delve into many wonderous locales and involve a wide spectrum of characters and situations. Though there are centaurs and man-eating gibbelins and fantastical locales such as The City of Never, the fantasy Dunsany presents is not of the sword and sorcery variety I expected to encounter.

In fact, the creativity of the different fantasy worlds this books offers is to credit for most of the book’s charm. You can draw a direct line from stories like “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” and “The Wonderful Window” to contemporary fabulists like Steven Millhauser. The stories are original, unique, and mostly devoid or typical fantasy tropes. And are quite delightful for it.

The characters are finely constructed and complex. At times we find them in familiar situations, yet they sometimes arrive with compelling motivations, or approach what might seem like mundane situations–albeit in an imaginary land–with unique approaches.  The excellent play with narrative scope helps accentuate this. Perhaps this falls on my lap as a relatively inexperienced reader of fantasy, but I expected a lot of tidy, “once upon a time” stories with clearly marked beginning, middle, and end points. Instead most of them begin in medias res, and usually in a different and unrelated universe as the previous story.

My favorite stories are those based in a more fabulist mode, like the two I mentioned above. There is also fare here that falls slightly more in line with what you might expect from a collection of fantasy stories, such as “The Bride of the Man-Horse” and “Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance.” In general I found the titles charming, even if they are a bit too much to the point, as is the case with “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men.”

Though at times the language can feel a bit dated and dry, it is on the whole a strong collection of stories by an author who those readers not versed in classic fantasy may never have heard of. The stories are quick and interesting enough to capture anyone’s attention long enough to tickle their imagination.

Other books: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Burton, trans.), Dangerous Laughter (Millhauser)