I’ve taken a break the last month or so from new fiction in favor of backlist – I always have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to read, as you must, and, now and then, they scream for attention. I’ve been reading more stories than novels, as I’m writing short stories right now. Always inspiring to rediscover the voices of the masters and reimagine storytelling styles.
So, I started with Raymond Carver, arguably one of the most original short story masters. I’ve been reading the collection entitled CATHEDRAL, which has nothing to do with God or religion, but some to do with edifices, of the artificial variety. He tells subtly simple stories in simple language, with quirky characters in odd circumstance, and he has a way of laying down a story like a musical track, to which he layers, and invites the reader to add our own layers of meaning. No happily ever after and rarely conclusive, these stories engage us to project into our own lives. Stimulating for reader and writer alike.
In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. [From the title story.]
No journey through short stories is possible without Alice Munro, whose stories feel like small novels. She tends to move around more than most – the story discreet within many moving parts – and some readers find that cumbersome, but, like a novel, the path, even when circuitous, is absolutely worth exploring to get to the meaning. I randomly selected a couple of stories in the collection DEAR LIFE, ignoring the margin notes from first and subsequent readings over the years, in order to rediscover the essence, and the craft. Munro gets into the heads and hearts and deep down into the bones of simple people, especially women, like no one else, thus the Nobel Prize ten years ago.
She was not slender anymore but gaunt, tired, no doubt, from the nights of getting up with me, but her age was telling, beyond that. Her beauty had been delicate all along. A blond woman’s easily flushing kind of looks, with that strange mixture of apology and high-class confidence about it was what she’d had, and lost. [From the story PRIDE]
I listened to THE MATH TEACHER, a story by the great Tessa Hadley in her newest collection, AFTER THE FUNERAL, and she never disappoints. Tessa writes aging women with greater insight than most, and with compassion, not sympathy and not always kindness. Her stories are raw and real and, like so many of her stories and novels, this one brought the fallout of presumption into the light. We never know what someone else is thinking, or feeling, and to assume otherwise invites disaster at worst, disappointment at best.
I might have returned to Lorrie Moore, another master of the short form, but instead revisited her acclaimed novel A GATE AT THE STAIRS. I was wowed by this work when published nearly 25 years ago, and all the more wowed now. Although, in my elder age, I have a resistance to so-called coming of age novels, having read one too many, and, let’s face it, how much adolescent angst can we put up with? This novel is not like any coming of age you will read – the protagonist/narrator is a uniquely acute observer, the story is more about discovering the hypocrisy of supposedly sophisticated adult living, and how often children languish in a world that marginalizes their needs. Most of all, Moore’s observations and insights are beyond astute, which is what makes her stories also worth revisiting.
When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself.
One more novel worth reading – for me, a first encounter. THE VIRGINS by Pamela Erens, the second novel by this should-be-better-known novelist, has put her on my permanent reading list. Yes, a coming of age fiction, and another boarding school novel, [how many times do we need to read about youthful entitlement?] but Erens focuses on a romantic triangle and the sexual revelations only experienced by the rebellious inexperienced. This is a story about abandon, in all its forms, both riveting and provocative, intellectually as well as sexually. I hear there’s a series based on the book but I haven’t seen it yet and hope they don’t trash it. Up next: THE UNDERSTORY, her debut novel, which takes place in NYC and features a down and out aging ex-lawyer, a different sort of coming of age, you might say, more to my taste.
What is he looking for? Or avoiding? Is he motivated by an unhealthy need for excitement? Feelings of inadequacy? An impulse toward self-destruction? No, no, the older generation has the wrong vocabulary altogether; they are blinded by concepts like illegality and addiction, and maybe even sin. Seung’s passion for intoxication has to do with his discovery, that very first time an older kid passed a spliff to him at a middle school football game, that there is something behind or beyond what ordinary experience presents to him, something he privately calls the inside. Only rarely does that inside reveal itself; mostly it teases him with transient glimmers of radiant energy…
I’ve got a few new and potentially fabulous novels next up so I will return soon with recommendations, I hope. Happy reading. Please patronize your local bookstore or at www.Bookshop.org which supports independent bookstores, or www.Thriftbooks.com if you prefer used copies, or, of course, your local library.