#214 To Hell With Dying- Alice Walker

#214 To Hell With Dying- Alice Walker

This is the final story in this great collection- In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Woman. Reading these slowly, space-out over the course of several months, I appreciated the subtle beauty of her prose in a way I wouldn’t have if I consumed them all at once.

“Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and loved down the road from us on a neglected cotton farm.”

He liked to play with the children from the area and they loved to play with Mr. Sweet. “Toward all us children he was very kind, and had the grace to be shy with us, which is unusual in grown-ups…his ability to be drunk and sober at the same time made him an ideal playmate, for he was as weak as we were and we could usually best him in wrestling.”

Such a sweet and touching love story, a perfect way to end this collection.

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#213 Another Pioneer- David Foster Wallace

By now you should all know how much I love and admire the writing of David Foster Wallace. You’ve heard my gushing diatribes about the genius of these stories, so I will try not to over-hype this—any more than I already have, that is.

What begins as an off-hand description of a passenger’s surroundings aboard a commercial airline, turns into a 26-page running tangent. 26 pages—one paragraph! How very DFW. You either like this type of literary challenge or you don’t. I can picture DFW siting in the airplane himself letting his mind wander where it will, and him just writing down what goes through his mind. This is what came out. One flight, 26-pages, one paragraph, pure brilliance.

Word of the Day: Heuristic-enabling a person to learn or discover something for themselves (google dictionary)

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, it’ds my blog and my rating system.

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

Although Kerouac really didn’t write traditional short fiction, he was prolific in pouring his thoughts on paper. Besides his novels and books of poetry, recently published collections of his notes and jottings have uncovered a few great clippets of planned novellas. Go Back is one of these short pieces written before his first novel, The Town and the City, was published.  Go Back, written in 1940, shows even this early where Kerouac was to take the form. He had a keen sense of the ethereal nature in all of us, but only wrote for himself, of himself, and from his own eyes, wide open, and sensing emotion everywhere.

His language was always poetic and rhythmic like the jazz and bop he got inspiration from. It’s hard not to stand up and read this aloud to the people on the bus next to me with their face buried in their phones or being deafened by over-produced music coming through their ears plugs drowning out the sights and sounds of real life right in front of them.

“Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are., brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.”

“I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was weep, but I couldn’t do that either.”

Has any group of writers—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs—ever been so open, vulnerable, and emotive than these? It’s a shame that Kerouac remains misunderstood by so many, that in the eyes of too many, he seems more like a James Dean caricature of a rebel instead of what he was: a big ball of energy and wonder, gulping life by the ocean-full.  Even these tossed aside pages of his notebooks have genius not seen since.

Rating: 8-8-9-10 Total=35

#210 The Last Mohican- Bernard Malamud

#210 The Last Mohican- Bernard Malamud

Fidelman is a failed painter and on sabbatical in Italy to study and write a book about Giotto. He was a perpectual student like Chekhov’s Trofimov. “If there was something to learn, I want to learn it.” (yet another writer doffing their cap to Chekhov)

He is set upon by a crafty beggar and cannot seem to get rid of him. He follows him and begs for his suit. When finding his briefcase stolen, assumingly by this beggar, he drops all his plans for study and travel and pursues his lost property.

He allows his regrets and poor decisions define him. We are all victims of something, but why be a victim twice, one of our own doing?

Notable Passage: “History was mysterious, the remembrance of things unknown, in a way burdensome, in a way a sensuous experience. It uplifted and depressed, why we did not know, except that it excited his thoughts more than he thought good for him.”

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total=26