The New Yorker: "Love Affair with Secondaries" by Craig Raine

I tell writing students that stories about adultery and stories about cancer are tired and done to death, and that stories about adultery AND cancer are no better. A story about either of these subjects or both should actually be about something else; the adultery and cancer should be backgrounded. Otherwise—boring. We’ve seen it. A million times.

I thought, at first, that this story was going to be about something else. It seemed to have a message about truth and then it seemed to be about consequences, but then it seemed to be about lies and no consequences, and finally it just seemed to be about adultery and the excuses we make for it.

The story is this: Piotr is having an affair partly because he thinks he’s dying. His wife, who has had an affair, finds out. The family holds an intervention, but it turns out that Piotr’s older brother has had an affair with the same woman. We’re all just mayflies, etc.

I think I’ve been giving my writing students good advice.

June 1, 2009: "Love Affair with Secondaries by Craig Raine

Munro Wins Man Booker International Prize

Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

The New Yorker: "Ava's Apartment" by Jonathan Lethem

Although it isn’t labeled a short story--The New Yorker doesn’t seem to do that--neither is this “fiction” by Jonathan Lethem labeled a novel excerpt, which it surely is. (The Contributor note for Lethem tells us that his novel Chronic City will be published in October.) I was enjoying the read, more or less, until I noticed that story-wise it wasn’t going anywhere; a check on that Contributor note confirmed my suspicion, and the lack of an ending left no doubt whatsoever. So, we’ve got another novel excerpt instead of a story, and as much as I liked Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn and another story of his I’ve seen in TNY, this one gets a non-response from me. The sentences seem fine. Good, even. The protagonist--if this main character serves that function in the novel, as I would guess--has a funky name (Perkus Tooth), but I don’t think I’m interested enough by this to pay for the book, or read it, when it comes out.

The fiction begins with Tooth, a “wall-eyed former rock critic,” who isn’t well (there's been some kind of party) and is forced by a devastating snowstorm to abandon his home and find other shelter. Which he does, quite readily--in an apartment building for dogs. Thinking he no longer wishes human companionship, he becomes the roommate of a three-legged pit bull named Ava, who, loving him unconditionally, teaches him something about humanity.

Really? Whatever. I liked the dog.

May 25, 2009: “Ava’s Apartment” by Jonathan Lethem

The New Yorker: "In the South" by Salman Rushdie

This is a terrific story, possibly my favorite of the year so far. Senior and Junior are two old men with the same name who have come to the same place by taking very different routes. Junior is alone in the world, but Senior is crowded by his second wife and her family as well as hundreds of family members of his own. The groundwork that Rushdie lays is beautiful and intricate.

“Neither man slept well anymore. At night they lay on hard beds without pillows and, behind their closed eyelids, their unsettled thoughts ran in opposite directions. Of the two men, V. Senior had lived by far the fuller life.”

And so it is no surprise that Senior is the one who is ready to pack it in. It is the end of the year and the New Year approaches. He tells Junior that either he will die in the next five days . . . or “else a year will begin in which my end will surely come.” Junior scoffs. And in fact Senior does not die.

Without giving too much of the story away, what happens is that the devastaing Christmas Tsunami that crippled so much of Indonesia, Thailand and South India strikes. Senior survives but is left to wonder, “Why not me?”

It’s a powerful story that I look forward to reading again.

May 18, 2009: “In the South” by Salman Rushdie

Five Star Literary Stories

My review of E.C. Osondu's "Waiting" (Guernica) is up at Five Star Literary Stories. Happy Short Story Month!

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
by Kevin Wilson
Ecco 2009 $13.99

I was curious about the cover of Kevin Wilson's collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. It shows the pieces of a model car, and I wondered what that had to do with tunneling. But then I read the story "Go, Fight, Win" and it all became clear.

This is a terrific collection, filled with Wilson's dry wit and twisted sensibilities. Just kidding about the "twisted" thing, but there are some pretty odd characters here: the woman who works as a stand-in grandmother, the recent graduate who lives underground, the guy who calculates worst-case scenarios. There are eleven stories here, not counting the "P.S." section that includes Kevin's story about how he became a writer, and an interview that's also pretty funny.

One of my favorites is "The Museum of Whatnot" about a woman who leaves her novelist boyfriend and becomes a museum dedicated to junk. Er, collectibles. Given that she dreads ownership of things herself--she makes exceptions if something can be useful--her job is ironic. And she herself may be on her way to becoming a collector because near the end of the story, when the elderly doctor who has been flirting with her gives her a gift of a barrette, it turns out that she has others.

The opening story, "Grand Stand-in," is another favorite. The narrator is employed as a stand-in grandmother, and it occurs to me that it could make a reality TV show. For various reasons, parents hire her to be the grandmother that their children need. Sometimes it's because the actual grandmother has recently died, and occasionally, as in the central incident in the story, there are other reasons.

But all the stories in this collection are rewarding. Expect to hear more from Kevin Wilson.

The New Yorker: "The Autobiography of J.G.B." by J.G. Ballard

More allegory? I have not read much J.G. Ballard, who died last month, so I don’t know how typical this is for him. Perhaps someone more familiar with his work can enlighten us?

In this story, J.G.B. wakes up one morning finds that the mail and newspapers have not been delivered, the power is off. He is annoyed by this and goes to see his neighbor, but the neighbor’s house is empty. Eventually it appears that the world is empty—no people, no dogs, no traffic, no airplanes. Nothing. His transistor radio works, but he only picks up static, including from European stations. He drives into London—nothing. He finds a motorboat, zooms over to France and finds Calais equally empty. In the meantime, though, he has been to the London zoo and found that the birds are still in their cages, and he frees them. In the end, surviving on canned food, he manages to forget all the people and lives alone, visited by the birds. The key is in the last line: “Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.”

Two possibilities occur to me, both sparked by the title of the story. One is that this is the autobiography of a writer, any writer, or indeed of any artist. That before one’s true work can emerge, one must eliminate the distractions of the world—save, perhaps, for the birds, which are traditional symbols of freedom, doubly so here because B has released them from their cages.

Given Ballard’s recent death, though, and remembering the poems of Updike that The New Yorker published after his death, I wonder if this little story isn’t [also] about death. Perhaps the author is speculating that this is what death is like—the absence of everyone you know. In death, one begins one’s true work: to decompose, visited only by the birds.

May 11, 2009: “The Autobiography of J.G.B.” by J.G. Ballard

The New Yorker: "The Slows" by Gail Hareven

Kicking off Short Story Month!

It takes a little while to figure out what’s going on here because the narrative voice sounds normal and the references are unknown by familiar—The Preserves could be a forest preserve, for example, and so as a place name it doesn’t raise much of a question. In the second paragraph the narrator reveals he studies “the Slows” and it isn’t clear yet what this is. But soon we come to know that it is a group of savage humans, and for a time the reader might suspect that the narrator is not human.

But we learn that the Slows are confined to reservations, isolated from the rest of the population, and that this narrator is an anthropologist who studies them. He has learned that the government has decided to close the Preserves, and so his work will end, but there is also the question of what will happen to the Slows. The woman has brought her child—the larva, he calls it—and the situation becomes clearer. Society has developed Accelerated Offspring Growth, a treatment for infants that brings them rapidly to maturity. Its purpose was to help populate colonies on other planets, but was also implemented on earth. The Slows, however, insisted on keeping the old ways, and are afraid that the Accelerateds will take the larva and give them the treatment. The narrator has some sympathy for the woman’s plight, but he is disgusted by her (the breast feeding!) and in the end easily turns her in.

A bit of allegory is it? The problem with allegory often is that you can make it mean whatever you want it to. So, I pick a political interpretation. Obviously, the Slows are the Conservatives/Republicans. They think they are preserving the old ways, but they are really just standing in the way of progress. And the Accelerateds are Progressives/Democrats, who are on the verge of eliminating the last of the Slows. Total domination. (There is that nagging bit bout an outbreak of Slow behavior in the colonies, but maybe that’s just the suggestion that backwardness, like polio, cannot truly be eradicated.) Or something. (Of course the author isn't American, she's Israeli, and so I'm almost certainly wrong. So then, what's it about?)

May 4, 2009: “The Slows” by Gail Hareven

It's Happening Again

Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network has declared May to be Short Story Month, and will be reading and writing about a lot of stories over the next few weeks. I joined in a couple of years ago in a big way. I won't be able to do a book a day as I tried to do that year, but I've got a bunch of story collections lying around that need to be read and dozens of journals, so I should have no shortage of stories to add to the mix.