#427 An Inch and a Half of Glory- Dashiell Hammett

#427 An Inch and a Half of Glory- Dashiell Hammett

The building was on fire, and everyone stood outside waiting for the fire trucks. It wasn’t a huge fire. Earl Parish saw a boys face appear in a window above the fire. He didn’t look scared, but Parish after much thought decided to go into the building before the fire trucks arrived to bring to boy out.

Although never in danger, the act was heroic and his name appeared in the papers the next day as saving the child from the fire. The notice was an inch and a half. He humbly accepted praise the next day and life went on.

“There had been nothing heroic—about his going into the smoking building: he had brought the child down not as one would snatch it from peril, but as one would protect it from awareness of peril. Nevertheless, it was pleasant to lie across his bed knowing that people throughout the city had read of what he had done, that his acquaintances thought him a man of courage.”

With time, people forgot about the act and his courage not spoken of often. This caused him resentment, it had become the most important part of his life. When people forget the defining part of your life, you feel you have no definition. He longed for more recognition and it ruined his life.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#426 What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers- Edith Pearlman

#426 What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers- Edith Pearlman

The title of this one alone blows me away. Too often we hear the opinions of those giving offense or those doing damage explaining how that offense or damage isn’t that bad.

“For a half century Gabrielle had avoided good causes as if they might defile her. Efficiency and orderliness were what she cared about, and her own lively good looks.”

Now inspired to do good things, she is taken to work for The Society Against Female Mutilation. However, like many people who suddenly “wake up” and want to help the world, they still cling to their vanity and the viewpoints of their privileged experience. Just because you are not the AX, doesn’t mean you can understand what a tree goes through.

When Gabrielle’s normal speaker gets ill, she employs a stand in for a fundraising event. The stand in gives strong opinions that seem to be against their work. But truth is truth and hearing it may change the way you think, if you are open to it of course.

There is a nice thread through this piece about intimacy and acceptance. I’m not sure I agree with how the group dealt with the two divergent testimonies. With such a short story, I’m not sure there was enough space to give adequate discussing.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#425 Devil Bird- Henry Dumas

#425 Devil Bird- Henry Dumas

This is a strong biblical allegory. God and Devil have come to visit to fight for the grandfather’s soul. Only they are not there to fight each other, they are partners ready to take the soul from this world to the next.

They decide the battle to be over a game of cards. Their fate lies in their own hands, literally: “you shall deal your own hand.”

“You will learn that you get no second chances in this game. Mistakes are costly.”

The story gets frantic as God and the Devil change rules, change clothes, change form. Our lives are not entirely our own.

Notable Passage: “Love is the ultimate rule…if you love the game, there is no rule."

Rating: 8-8-9-9 Total= 34

#424 Young Man Blues- Luis Alberto Urrea

#424 Young Man Blues- Luis Alberto Urrea

The sins of the father fall on the son’s shoulders. Joey takes care of his drunken mother while his father is in prison. I laughed at the first line of this one:

“It sounded like a vacation spot: Pelican Bay.”

Of course it isn’t really funny at all. It’s tragic. His father was in the most notorious, maximum-security prison this country has. He was a gangbanger. His motorcycle gang, The Visigoths, were trying to take territory that wasn’t theirs. There were shootings, now Joey is left in its wake. He looks through his father’s gear including Nazi paraphernalia and club jackets.

“He knew that if he stepped outside wearing the vest, he’d be dead in an hour. It gave the colors a weird sense of power.”

He didn’t want any of that, but he held onto it because it was his fathers. Butchie, a member of his dad’s club wants Joey to hand over a gun, but he won’t.  Now he’s in trouble. He can get out of trouble if he helps Butchie rob Joey’s employer. He won’t do that either. Now he’s really in trouble. Salvation might have come too late.

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

#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny

#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny

This story just has a natural humor to it. Not that the topic was all that funny, a woman having an affair with a neighbor, but the breezy style it’s written, somehow softens our judgment of that situation, and we get a story told by someone that could be a friend of ours.

Nina is very self aware about her infidelity and what kind of person it makes her but she does it anyway.

“Oh, it was horrible to have a teenager’s emotions and a forty-year-old’s body. It was humiliating. It was depressing. It was degrading. It made her feel alive to the very tips of her toes.”

Like I said, there is nothing naturally amusing about this story, its just told very well. The humor is in the details. Like the name of her neighbor—Bunny Pringle. “The most interesting thing about Bunny Pringle, in Nina’s opinion, was that everyone always referred to her by both her first and last name, like Darth Vader.”

Heiny has a very plaintive, matter of fact attitude towards her character’s relationships that I find relieving. So many of the stories I’ve read about relationships, infidelity, failed marriages are just so weighty, or self-indulgent. This is just one person sitting at a bar saying: “Guess what I did the other day?”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#422 Why Coyote Never had Money For Parking- Chuck Palahniuk

#422 Why Coyote Never had Money For Parking- Chuck Palahniuk

Coyote is in a struggling marriage with Hyena, and has a weekly tryst with Flamingo, the local prostitute. He loathes living in this (literal) urban jungle where he thinks nobody contributes to society and they’re all out only for themselves. He wanted to be a rock star, but ended up in this disappointing marriage instead:

“He knew that marriage was like one of those movies where the only exciting parts are all squeezed into the three minute preview.”

Nobody in this story is exactly what they seem, and not only because they’re written as animals.

Reading these anthropomorphic stories where all the characters are animals is like seeing those Gary Larson Far Side comics. Its funny on the surface because, “hey look a cow is talking like a human.” But then you see the satire right below the surface. If done well, you forget the delivery method, and are left with the message. It’s brilliant because too often, people see an archetypal character and assign a stereotype from their own mind into it, and the commentary is tainted or lost.

So in that way, it’s also kind of a Rorschach Test for the reader. When Coyote calls Ox and Llama lazy no good ____ you see them as ____. When really they are just an Ox and a Llama, there is no subtext for them written in. Which is fascinating to me. Sometimes a Jackass is just a Jackass.

Notable Passage: “Everything was free if you’d pay enough.”

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#421 The Prison- Domenic Stansberry

#421 The Prison- Domenic Stansberry

Jojo was back from the war, everything had changed. North Beach was still the old neighborhood, but his father wasn’t there any more. His father used to be a respected newspaper man, ran a local Italian weekly. At the start of the war, he was brought before a hearing and sent to an interment camp.

Now Jojo is caught between San Francisco and Reno where his father is. He won’t return, he has been shamed publically and his pride will not allow him to come back. Jojo resents his whole neighborhood for allowing this to happen to his family while he was serving his country.

All this happens as they watch Alcatraz burn in the failed prisoner revolt of 1946.

Notable Passage: “I hadn’t planned to be here, but here I was. There are things you don’t escape. In the dark.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27

#420 Barefoot Dogs- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#420 Barefoot Dogs- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

This is the title story of this collection. As in most of them, it’s about a wealthy family fleeing the violence in Mexico City. They have a newborn child and the father is up early taking care of the baby, reluctantly and resentfully.

“I take the baby out and feel him looking at me. I avoid his eyes. He is an exact replica of me. It gives me the creeps.”

He’s ashamed that he has fled ashamed of what has become of him family. “What a horrible and pathetic father. How immature, how useless and cowardly. I imagine her asking herself why she’s still with me and what’s keeping her from leaving, from meeting someone else, a real man. Someone like my father.”

His father has been kidnapped, and as he continues to move his family away from danger, the kidnappers send parts of his father they have cut off, in boxes to him. The violence that follows then is no joke.

As this collection finishes, I am left feeling a little confused. I’m not exactly sure how I’m supposed to feel. I can’t say that anyone in these stories deserves the violence that befell them, but they aren’t painted in a great light either. They are wealthy, privileged, sheltered and out of touch with reality.

I guess this story is a microcosm of it all. If you focus on the father-son story lines, on a human level, you can sympathize. But on the other hand, we see a man who has fled mexico, his father is being cut up into small pieces and his thoughts are about gow embarrassing it would be to rent an apartment already furnished; or how he could furnish it himself by buying the whole furniture store, but he wouldn’t because it was all too cheap for his taste. So, again, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about characters I have no connection with.

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

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

Robin Ross has died over night, she was suffering in the hospital a week before finally succumbing to cancer. He goof friend was going to visit the night before she died, but it was late and she decided not go, now she will never have a chance to say goodbye.

This story is a dream, or a mental hallucination, a creation born of anxiety and guilt. She imagines Robin coming back as a ghost for one day so she and her friends can have one more night of drinking together. She tries to put her own life in perspective, feeling inadequate.

“In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our mothers, and one another.”

Notable Passage: “Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew for ourselves, or anyone else.”

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

#418 When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine- Jhumpa Lahiri

#418 When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine- Jhumpa Lahiri

It is the era of Partition. India, Pakistan and the soon to be created Bangladesh is on the brink of war. Mr. Pizada is a visiting scholar in New England and is away from his wife and seven daughters. They are Bengali and lost among the millions of refugees.

Mr. Pirzada comes to visit Lilia’s family every night to watch the news. He is welcome in their house, as they are Indian, but Lilia cannot understand what is happening nor can she make sense about what is supposed to make him different from them.

“It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands.”

In a short time, they become close, and when he eventually returns to his family, they feel the loss sharply.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#417 The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury- Neil Gaiman

#417 The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury- Neil Gaiman

This is a brilliant story.  Neil Gaiman can’t remember the name of a friend of his, presumably Ray Bradbury.

“I am losing words, although I am not losing concepts. I hope that I am not losing concepts. If I am losing concepts, I am not aware of it. If I am losing concepts, how would I know?”

So, this whole thing is mental game trying to get his mind to remember that name. Trying to trick his mind with hints, pictures, anything to open that path. He can remember a lot of other things, almost everything else about him, then why not the name of his friend.

“Icarus! It’s not as if I have forgotten all names. I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”

The mind is a funny thing. In the introduction, Gaimen says that he wrote this piece and gave it to Bradbury for a ninetieth birthday gift. I’m so glad they decided to share it with us. Reading so many stories, I have come to appreciate truly unique styles an concepts. This is just great!

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

Marla recently found out her sister, long since removed from her life, was still alive. She had been sent away by her family because of some disturbing tendencies and never spoke of her again. Now with her father dead, she found Irene and has welcomed her back to her family’s 15-room apartment on Central Park West.

As an attorney, Marla has gained a reputation as a viscous opponent, and outside the courtroom, she and her two shadowy body men, she is known as an old-school Bronx enforcer.

“Marla shouldn’t have been so cruel. She lived a monstrous life, shielding murderers and swindlers, defying prosecutors and ripping out the threads of their elaborate tales.”

Now with her sister in her life, and the law practice she has always fought for, she is at the height of her power, but at what cost? She defends the city’s worst criminals, and when one of them has eyes on her sister, perhaps the chickens have come home to roost. It was her after all that kept them out of jail.

“She was the criminal, not Marcellus Bloom. Marla had created the monster, allowed him to flourish. He should have been locked away a long time ago, with Marla in the next cell.”

She also, got her sister out of her institution living. Irene also had criminal tendencies. It’s hard to see who to root for in some of thee stories, and I’m not sure we’re supposed to feel good about any of them. The Mother is shallow, and will think good of anyone as long as they give her presents, Marla is a mob boss type amoral criminal attorney, Irene is a psychopath. I don’t suppose there is any hope for the children if these are the three role models.

What makes for a lousy family sometimes makes for a good story at least.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

This is a much different story than the first few in the collection. The narrator is going through a change, a Kafka-esque metamorphosis, turning slowly into a werewolf. They call it a disease, but they also think of it as a curse. The town is steps away from pitch-forks and torches, so the family stages her death, for their own sake, especially to protect their other daughter.

Now she lives hidden, but with anonymity comes a little more freedom to roam about at night. A funny moment is when she comes stumbles across a couple having sex in the woods, she thinks they are of her kind because they have fits and scream like she does. But when she approaches to give them a friendly kiss, all she knows how to do it bite.

Like the Kafka tale this is a worthy homage to, it’s about alienation, and being isolated and ostracized because of ones differences; being made to feel like a burden and the cause of other’s feeling of resentment.

“However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Lusus Naturae is Latin meaning: freak of nature.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#414 The Princess and the Plumber- Sheila Heti

#414 The Princess and the Plumber- Sheila Heti

This was another week of all new collections. This one is the odd and quirky book, The Middle Stories of Sheila Heti. It’s an odd, but fun mix of fairy-tale and dream where modern life seeps into a Disney film.

The plumber is in love with the princess, and must have her. She doesn’t love him and rebuffs his proposals.

“That evening he went home and, using a hammer and some wood, built the most marvelous marriage contraption the world has ever seen. It takes a special kind of man to invent something new, something never before thought of, and that night, inspired by her rejection, he did just that.”

We never find out exactly what the contraption is, nor does the princess. She refuses to see him and the castle is under quarantine with a disease. He is to blame, a meddlesome frog tells him, but we don’t know why. We do know that world is changing and people will soon live to be two hundred years old, and with nothing but leisure tike, because everyone will love in the new welfare state. But the plumber cries filling the world with his sadness like snow covers the hills.

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

#413 That Colour- Jon McGregor

#413 That Colour- Jon McGregor

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is a collection that has been on The-Best-Of lists since it was published a few years ago. This first salvo is, as we have seen in several collections, a short mood setter, an "amuse bouche" to announce the intention of the overall work

A woman stares out the window ruminating on the shortness of the years and the changing of the season. She is awed by it, as if it is the first time she has thought these things. Her husband, more pragmatic:

“I asked her why she was so surprised. I told her it was autumn, it was what happened…I told her she went through this every year…I dried my hands and went through the front room and stood beside her. I felt for her hand and held it. I said, But tell me again.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#412 Superstar- Susan Steinberg

#412 Superstar- Susan Steinberg

Now this is something different. This is a story written in statements only. Each sentence is its own line, its own paragraph. At times it can look like poetry, but for the most part, it is not poetic (exception: the notable passage below). We are getting the inner thoughts of a woman riding in the crowded back seat of her friends car after she has stolen a car radio. It was a revenge theft of a guy she hooked up with.

This is thick with male-female power dynamics. She steals the radio because she wants to own this man completely. Then when she gets into a small fender bender with a guy, he treats her like shit calling her names like only a man can call a woman.  Then comes guy #2 who comes to her rescue and is condescending like only a man can be condescending to a woman.

It’s not something I want to explain.

If you have the parts you understand.

As for the rest of you.

Just know I knew it was good to be a woman.

Meaning it was very bad to be a woman.

This is a very good, powerful start for this collection, Spectacle.

Notable Passage: “A sound I can’t describe.

                                    A Sound that was more like a color.

                                    A Color that was more like a pain.

                                    A pain that was more like an answer.”

Rating: 8-9-10-9 Total= 36

#411 Rust and Bone- Craig Davidson

#411 Rust and Bone- Craig Davidson

This is the title story of Davidson’s award winning short story collection. Eddie is a fighter, a boxer. This is who he is.

“Fighting becomes a job, stepping into the ring punching a clock. It’s a pragmatic pursuit, opponent’s equations to be solved using the chimerical physics of reach, height, spacing, leverage, heart. You’d no more fight outside the ropes than a factory lineman would work a shift for no pay.”

However, he does fight outside the ring, just not with his fists. The story starts with an explanation about the 28 bones in each hand, the intricacies of them and their fragility. You can teach a boxer footwork, build his abs to take body blows, but if you break the bones in your hand, that is a weakness that will stay with you for your whole career.

“You fight, you lose, you fight, you win, you fight.”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#410 My Man Bovanne- Toni Cade Bambara

#410 My Man Bovanne- Toni Cade Bambara

This is from Bambara’s collection, Gorilla, My Love, originally printed in 1960. A woman, a single mother dances with a blind man, she enjoys herself. She is a city girl, through and through.

“And I ain’t never been souther than Brooklyn-Battery and no more country than the window box on my fire escape.”

All around her the community is changing, the “grass roots” and “black power” is growing, and suddenly thongs she is wearing and thongs she has been doing for years is being criticized. Her own sons are calling her horrible names for dancing with the blind man. Maybe she enjoyed the dance, because he was the only one in her life that wasn’t judging her superficially.

In the introduction to this collection, Bambara says she doesn’t write autobiographical fiction because she doesn’t want the hassle of friends and family getting upset at what she writes about.

“So I deal in straight up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.”

That’s a great quote!

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled into an existence of complacency and greyness.

“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.”

“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and perversely satisfying in Hampton.”

While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is successful, she drinks, and they hook up.

“His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual, and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught his detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity for things."

Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others unhappy as well.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

Like father like son. A man lies awake, unable to sleep. It’s his son’s twelfth birthday.

“I am dozing trapped between midnight and dawn, and in my half sleep, I listen as rain sleets against our bedroom window; oak branches, stripped by autumn, scrape at the back of the house,”

He hears his son talking in his room, muffled, but when he looks in, his sin has closed his eyes pretending to sleep. He remembers when he was twelve, riding with his own father in his big rig. He too didn’t want to talk with his father, waiting for him to leave the rig, so he could talk to a stranger on the CB.

There is not enough time to miss good opportunities to talk to those most important to us. There are only so many miles an engine has before it dies.

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