Life's a Mess

Life doesn't run smoothly when you're a character in an Andre Dubus III story. In his earlier novel, "House of Sand and Fog", he sent his characters on collision courses with each other, with disastrous results. His latest work, Dirty Love, is a collection of four stories, somewhere between long short stories and short novelllas. The setting is a small New England coastal town. His characters all yearn for love, but they make desperate choices and are often their own worst enemies.

These stories are not for readers who like characters they can admire. I often wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake hard. But Dubus's talent is to make them so vividly real, so desperate and vulnerable and frightened by their choices, that I was never tempted to judge them. And in each story the characters are left with a flickering of hope that they might yet sort out the mess in their lives.

An Open Door

Reading a short story is like peering through an open door into an unfamiliar house. You're dropped into the lives of the residents. You watch for a while, people talk, things happen, and then the door closes – sometimes with a slam and sometimes very quietly. So my criterion for a good short story is simple – did I hang around until the door closed or did I just shrug and walk away?

When I chose to read a short story collection entitled Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned I didn't really expect the stories to be about good deeds rewarded or true love conquering all. So I wasn't surprised that many of the characters in Wells Tower's stories were in some way either ravaged or burned or both. But they all passed my test – I never walked away before the door closed (although there was one where I maybe wish I had).

Tower's characters are bumbling, conflicted and confused, and they keep bumping up against forces they can't quite handle. If you think this sounds like overworked territory it's only because you haven't read Tower's prose. It's dark and funny, tight but beautifully descriptive. His characters recognize their own shortcomings in refreshingly honest voices.

My one caveat concerns the last story which, unlike the others, which are set in present day, deals with a band of marauding Vikings. Its title is the same as the collection's, and there's plenty a ravaging and burning, a little too much for my tastes. But the other eight stories more than make up for it.

Unexpected Slices

I always have trouble writing a blog about a book of short stories. Do I describe the ones I liked best? I don't want to give away too much. Part of what I liked best about the ten stories in Robin Black's “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This” was that they seemed both familiar and unexpected at the same time.

For example, there's a story (“Harriet Elliot”) told by a fifth grade girl about a new girl in her class. But it's also about the narrator's own struggles to deal with her disintegrating family. We've all read these stories of childhood unhappiness, but this one approaches it from a different angle. And the all too familiar dynamic of a parent dealing with a teenager leaving the nest is viewed through the lens of a father's reluctant acceptance of a guide dog for his blind daughter (“The Guide”).

Black gives us views of familiar subjects – fidelity, loss, guilt, acceptance – approached in fresh and unexpected ways. Some stories work better than others (I thought the title story “If I Loved You” seemed labored), but I was moved and surprised by all ten.

The New South

Bobbie Ann Mason became well known twenty years ago when she wrote “Shiloh and Other Stories”. She wrote a best selling novel, “In Country”, and her memoir, “Clear Springs” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But she is best known for the strong characters and descriptive details of her short stories.
“Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail” was published in 2001. These stories have a distinct southern flavor but they roam the world from England to Alaska and even to Saudi Arabia. They are about people who are searching the world for meaning in their lives and many of them find themselves back in Kentucky, the place they began their quest.

The first story, “With Jazz”, finds a middle aged woman who has been divorced twice and finds herself visiting her son who lives alone in the woods. She sits down on his bed and felt strange, “as though all my life I had be zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place.”

In “Tobrah” a single, forty five year old woman goes to her father’s funeral in Oklahoma and finds herself home in Kentucky the caretaker of her father’s four year old daughter. In “Rolling into Atlanta”, Annie Rhodes finds herself working as a sort of undercover agent for the owner of a chain of restaurants. But she finds herself strangely attracted to the people she should be investigating.

Sandra, who has escaped from a small town in Kentucky and found an exciting life in Alaska, now returns home to care for her ailing father. She tries to tell her father about her wonderful life in Alaska, but she realizes that what is important is to be there for her father.

All of Ms. Mason’s characters are strong, independent and striving to understand their world. But in the end they find what they need by zigzagging back to the world they came from.

“Zigzagging Down A wild Trail” is a great collection of short stories by a writer who uses drama, humor and wonderful language to present a clear picture of the South and how it has been changing over the past few decades.

British Short Stories

Jane Gardam, now in her 80's, is a British writer, winner of many literary awards in Great Britain. However, until recently her work has not quite translated to the U.S. so we are only recently discovering her gifts. Her newest book Old Filth received a very positive review on NPR and I elected to start with an earlier collection of her short stories. The People on Privilege Hill is a quirky, sometimes hilarious and often moving collection of tales about individuals living in London during and after World War II. They range from 3 retired and lonely judges, to a woman who formerly drove young women in a home for unwed mothers to court where they gave up their babies for adoption during the war. One titled Babette, of course caught my eye! It's a clever and very funny tale of a woman who thinks Babette (author of one hit novel followed by years of obscurity) is dead, but our writer is contacted by the author Babette after reviewing her work for a publication. Babette bequeaths several unusual and very heavy antiques to our writer, which are hidden away and sealed in an old attic. The tale of what then occurs provides the delightful surprising almost slapstick humor in the story. Gardam intimately understands the small, daily lives, routines, heartaches and delights of her characters and is clearly skilled at making them real. The added bonus (perhaps) is that I did look up three words in her story that were not entirely familiar to me (stave, balaclava, rime) and thus expanded my vocabulary as well. It's well past the time when this talented writer should finally be discovered by Americans.

Inside Pakistan

The epigraph to In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin's debut collection of eight linked short stories, is a Punjabi proverb: ”Three things for which we kill – Land, women and gold”. All the stories are set in Pakistan, all intersect in some way with the household of a wealthy landowner named K.K. Harouni, and all do indeed revolve around land, women and gold. Some stories are about rich and powerful members of the Punjabi elite, while others are drivers, cooks, managers who serve the rich and try to improve their place in life.

Many of the women characters try to use sex to maneuver themselves into positions of power, but most find themselves kicked to the curb in the end. The men have more options but seem to lack backbone.

Mueenuddin does a great job of showing class differences not with detailed descriptions but with slight gestures that pass between characters. He was born in Lahore (to a Pakistani father and American mother), and he has an insider's view of life in Pakistan. But although the stories often seem to belong quite specifically to the Pakistani culture, they also powerfully reflect the basic human emotions that all readers can recognize.

Short and Bittersweet

What do I want from a short story? I like to discover a character who, even the brief space of the story, captures and holds my attention. Most of the eleven stories in Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It more than satisfy that requirement.

Her characters are flawed, conflicted, not always likable but utterly believable. Echoing the title, a character in “The Children”, trying to decide whether to leave his wife, says bluntly “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”. And in “Travis, B.”, when a young ranch hand realizes he is out of his depth in pursuing a romance with a young lawyer, he muses that he “had wanted practice, with girls, and now he had gotten it, but he wished it had felt more like practice”.

Several stories have twists at the end, but they never feel gimmicky or manipulative. In nearly all of them a character is pulled in opposing directions, and each is resolved (or not resolved) in a fresh way. Meloy's style is crisp and understated, and in several stories she uses the stark and powerful landscape of Montana as a backdrop.

Sometimes I'm not ready to start reading a new novel, or maybe I want a quick break from the one I'm reading, and I'm looking for a satisfying short story that I can gulp down whole. For me, Meloy's stories rank near Alice Munro's for satisfying that thirst.

A Christmas Favorite

My favorite Christmas book?  Without a doubt it's Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory.  Written in 1956 for Mademoiselle magazine, it is the nostalgic but not sentimental story of Buddy, a seven year old boy living in the South with distant relatives, and his best friend and companion Sook, an elderly but childlike cousin.  Buddy narrates the tale of their Christmas preparations, including an elaborate fruitcake-making production, the choosing and cutting of a Christmas tree, and the making of decorations and gifts.  (It was later made into an excellent television show with the incomparable Geraldine Brooks as Sook and Capote himself as the narrator).

I hope you all have fond Christmas memories of your own and that you add new ones today.

PS Don't forget - our Living2Read discussion of The Radetzky March begins on January 8th.

The Adventures of Reading

Reading short stories has always been an adventure for me. I’m never quite sure what I will encounter. Some of the best examples of this genre are found in Houghton Miflin’s yearly publication called “The Best American Short Stories”. Each year Houghton Miflin chooses a well known author to be the “guest editor”. A Houghton Miflin editor in charge gives the guest editor about a hundred and fifty stories chosen from recent magazine publications and the guest editor chooses twenty stories that he feels are the “best” to be published in this year’s volume.

The “Best American Short Stories - 2008” was edited by Salmon Rushdie the acclaimed author of “Midnight’s Children”, “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and many other fiction and nonfiction works. I was very impressed by the richness, diversity and strength of this collection. Many of the stories have a strong element of surprise and/or suspense, which caused me hold my breath as I turned the pages. And most of them are truly imaginative. Some of the authors are well known, such as Alice Munroe, Tobias Wolfe and T.C. Boyle but for some it is their first published work. The common thread in this selection of stories is originality and surprise.

One of my favorites is a story by the famed short story writer, Alice Munroe, called “Child’s Play”. It is about two pre adolescent girls at a Christian summer camp in Canada. It is told as a flashback as one of the women is near death and the other is a world traveled, published author. The story pulls you in with straight forward, chatty prose and then stuns you with an ending that is frightening and hard to believe. Another strange and haunting story is Katie Chase’s “Man and Wife”, a story about an arranged marriage between a nine year old girl and a grown man, told by the child as she is contemplating her future. The strange part about the story is that it all seems so normal but you know it is not.

A story I particularly liked is Nicole Krauss’ “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky”. It is about an American poet who inherits a desk from a Chilean writer and somehow the life and fate of the writer living in Chile becomes part of the poet’s life in New York. It is a moving story that leaves you to wonder what real or imaginary effect the desk had on the protagonist.

I could go on and on about these wonderful stories but do yourself a great favor and read them, or give the volume, as a gift, to someone who loves to read. They will really enjoy it and probably want to discuss the stories at length.

A Classic Short Story

Last winter I took a class on the short story. I have long been a fan of Eudora Welty, but somehow I had never read one her best known stories - “Why I Live at the P.O.”. Welty worked for the WPA as a publicity photographer in the 30's, and she has said the story was inspired by a woman she saw ironing in the back room of a small rural post office in Mississippi.

The story, set in China Grove, Mississippi, is told as a monologue by Sister, who has moved into the post office (“the next to smallest P.O in the state of Mississippi”) after quarreling with her family. The quarrel was prompted by the return home of her sister Stella-Rondo, whom Sister resents because she has stolen Sister's beau Mr. Whitaker by telling him that Sister was one-sided - “Bigger on one side that the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same.” Sister could certainly be categorized as an unreliable narrator, but I don't think I've ever read a funnier one. The quarrel escalates as the various family members – Mama, Papa-Daddy, Uncle Rondo – fail to take her side and refuse to question Stella-Rondo about the “very peculiar-looking child” Shirley-T whom she has brought home with her and whom she claims is adopted. Stella-Rondo is twelve months younger than Sister, and as is often the case with siblings, she knows how to push her older sister's buttons. With her help Sister succeeds in hilariously infuriating all the family members.

Welty is known and beloved for her talent of infusing her stories with the authentic flavor of Mississippi. Sister, clearly the cook of the family, finds time to try “to stretch two chickens over five people” and make green-tomato pickles and watermelon rind preserves while she bickers. But I doubt that Sister will remain at the P.O. too long. She's far too curious to get to the bottom of her sister's reappearance, and it's clear that family spats are an essential source of entertainment in this China Grove household. Welty paints them all so vividly that I hated to leave them.

There's a wonderful reading of this story by Stockard Channing on PRI's Selected Shorts.

Small Town Life

When I picked up Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, I didn’t realize:

a. that this author had also written Amy and Isabelle which we had read in our book group in 2000; and

b. that this is a group of short stories and not technically a novel.

It has a very interesting structure. Olive Kitteridge of the title lives in the small fictional Maine town of Crosby where as a working adult she has taught seventh grade math. In some of the stories (there are 13 in all), Olive is the main character and the story explores some aspect of her relationships with her husband and her son. In other stories, Olive has a supporting role to a main character who was a school colleague (for example, the school nurse). And in yet another story Olive may have only a mention as the seventh grade teacher of the now-grown student who is the focus of the story. But I think the individual stories would not work as well apart from their integration into the whole narrative. One thing you quickly notice about Olive is that she seems perpetually angry. The questions of course are “why?” and “at whom?”.

I can say with certainty that this is a collection of the saddest stories that I have ever read: dysfunctional families, loneliness, infidelity, grief, disappointment. Which isn’t a reason not to read – and enjoy – this book, but I would recommend taking it in small doses. The final story seems a little contrived, put there to leave the reader feeling somewhat hopeful and optimistic.

Why the sadness? Perhaps as Olive reflects “… in the presence of someone else’s sorrow, a tiny crack of light would somehow come through her own dark encasement.” The stories are also reminders that you can know someone for a long time…and yet not really know him or her much at all.

The writing is polished and evocative as you would expect from someone on the faculty of a university MFA program. Though a small Maine town could not be more different from the urban setting in which I live, I am left with much food for thought and reflection.

Walking with Jack

I never read Jack London when I was growing up. My impression was that books by authors like London, James Fenimore Cooper and Booth Tarkington were 'boy books'. Plus, I was not interested in books about animals (sorry all you Black Stallion fans). So it wasn't until my short story class read “To Build a Fire” that I was first exposed to London's writing. I decided to load the story onto my Ipod and listen as I walked, so I have some advice for you if you plan do the same.

First, know where you're going. I was walking on a familiar path so there was no chance I would get lost, but there's about 30 minutes of my walk that I simply can't recall. In my mind I was walking through Yukon wilderness with a man and a dog. Second, dress warmly. In the story the temperature is 75 below, so even though it was in the mid-50's in San Francisco I was certain that my fingers were getting frost-bitten. Third, slow down. If I had been reading this story I would no doubt have been racing ahead, skipping words or even paragraphs, to find out what happened. But since I was listening instead of reading, I kept walking faster, trying to hurry the man and dog along to the end of the tale. But the real pleasure comes from savoring London's stark prose, from allowing this thrilling story of man versus nature to unfold at its own elegant pace.

This story in its entirety is available at several online sites, including The World of Jack London. Or you could download it from iTunes and go for a walk.

Word for Word

For certain fortunate authors their works will have more forms of life than just the printed page. There is the regular movie option with the script usually written by someone else and judged more - or less - successful, usually “less” from the perspectives of those who have read the book. There is the audio book format, sometimes read by the author, more often read by someone else. More recently the printed word has found its way into an e-book to be read on one’s computer or on a handheld device such as a Kindle. And then there is Word for Word.

This is a professional theater company in San Francisco that stages short stories and book chapters, performing every word (including “and he said” “and she said”) the author has written. Their most recent production, widely acclaimed by the critics and audiences, was of three short stories by Tobias Wolff taken from his latest collection, Our Story Begins. This anthology includes 21 previously published stories as well as 10 new ones. The stories in this production were “Sanity,” “Down to Bone,” and Firelight.” They are a mixture of comedy, poignancy, grief, love, reflection, and a little sex. The same cast of 5 actors performed all three stories, though not all 5 appeared in each story.

If you are not familiar with this company, you may be wondering whether, with the content already taken care of (I was tempted to say “spoken for”), there remains any real avenue for creativity. All I can say is that the staging has to be seen to be believed. The sets, costumes and choreography all combine to bring these stories to another level of meaning from just the written word. For example, in “Down to Bone” (one of the previously unpublished stories), the son who has come to visit his dying mother has rented a “lollipop-red Miata.” To say that the Miata is portrayed by a sexy young woman in a red vinyl mini dress does not begin to convey the success of this interpretation.

As this is the second time that Word for Word has performed some of Tobias Wolff’s stories, I can only hope that there will be more. I certainly recommend that you add Word for Word to your “reading.”

Transplants

The title of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom House. In describing how human nature needs to be transplanted in order to flourish Hawthorne says: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”. The Indian characters in all eight of these stories have been transplanted. But do they always flourish?

In the title story, unaccustomed earth refers not only to transplanted lives, but quite literally to the earth itself, as Ruma, newly settled in Seattle, is visited by her father. He plants a garden for her, and establishes a loving connection with his grandson, but father and daughter are never quite able to share their secrets. In the exquisite “Hell-Heaven”, a daughter's view of her mother changes as she moves from childhood to adulthood. The last three stories, grouped under the title “Hema and Kaishuk”, trace the lives of these two transplants from the Cambridge of their childhood to their chance encounter in Rome as adults.

In one sense the characters are quite specific – first and second generation Bengalis transplanted to the United States. But Lahiri is so talented at describing the bonds that both connect and constrain her characters – husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers – that their appeal is universal. Not all the stories are equally successful. I thought that “Going Ashore”, the final story in the “Hema and Kaishuk” section, was somewhat contrived. But the first and second stories in that section more than make up for that, especially “Year's End”, where Kaishuk, then a college student, struggles to deal with the loss of his mother and the new life his father has built. Lahiri's prose seems effortless. I never see her pulling the strings but I am drawn into her stories, wanting to follow her characters. Her stories are often sad, sometimes even heartbreaking, but always compelling.

Every Month a Valentine

Just before Valentine’s Day this year I read a review by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post of My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides (you may know him from Middlesex). Those Classics scholars among us may recognize the title as from a love poem by Catullus. That is your clue that this is a collection of love stories. In the review Dirda refers to Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” which is included in this collection as “what I and many others feel to be the greatest of all modern love stories…” With a teaser like that how could I not immediately order the book from my local library? My local library is my new best friend: log on to their website, request the book and receive an email when the book is ready for pick-up. Well worth the 50 cents!

I have to confess that the superlatives for this story surprise me. Perhaps it is the attention and sensitivity to nuance required by the brevity of the short story form that make it difficult for me and why I have never developed an appreciation for the form. Subsequent re-readings may help. The list of other authors in the collection includes names familiar (Faulkner, Joyce, Kundera, Nabokov, Malamud, Munro) and others less so.

I was inspired to dust off Nothing But You - Love Stories from The New Yorker edited by Roger Angell which has been sitting unread on my own bookshelf. Reading either of these books straight through seems to me like eating a meal only of desserts: the enjoyment of each is diluted by its proximity to the others. So I have resolved to take them one story at a time – each month on the 14^th - a little Valentine to myself. It’s almost that time.