#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

Josie, a married woman with two kids and a nice happy life has been sleeping with a man she met on facebook. Now this man is breaking up with her for a woman he met on twitter. The irony of all this isn’t lost on Josie of course who has felt strange about the whole order of things anyway:

“We’re doing all this backwards…their minds had fallen in love before their bodies did and what if their bodies got all stubborn and wouldn’t fall in line?”

If Heiny wasn’t an exceptional storyteller, this is where I’d be saying how saturated I’ve become with tales of infidelity, or I’d say how un-clever the love-in-the-age-of-social-media story line is. If I did say all those things, I’d have a lot of evidence to back my statement up. However, even when I don’t get blown away by her story subjects, I still really enjoy reading Heiny’s stories. Perhaps it’s the matter-of-fact nonjudgmental take on morality issues, or that even when there seems to be little emotion in the characters it’s less about being cold and more about not wallowing in other people’s feelings.

This may be my least favorite in this collection so far, but I’ll still take it over the majority of other stories with similar topics.

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

#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

Maya is having an affair with her mentor and boss. They began the affair the night she was celebrating her engagement to Rhodes, her fiancé. This is a kind of last fling affair, probably.

She has a theory that the smarter the man, the more likely it is that after sex, as part of a pillow-talk ritual, he will spout off some kind of inane factoid. That a clear mind inspires this kind of knowledge. The story here is glued together with these little facts, like dark matter that glues together the universe.

This story is less about the affair than about relationship dynamics between men and woman. Maya has had men tell her facts her whole life, like she needs to be taught something, but the one time she gives a fact, its truthfulness is questioned. Heiny’s style is impeccable and light. There is a seamless flow to the dialogue and well articulated shape to the story.

Rating: 9-6-7-8 Total= 30

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

This story is about loss, dependence, love, worth. Maya knows that her dog is dying, and she also knows that her relationship should probably end soon, maybe. It’s a battle in her mind between the unconditional love of a dog and the complicated love between humans.

This is a no fault story, there is no antagonist, just the thoughts of Maya. We root for her to find that something that will settle het mind down. We don’t know, as readers either whether she should break up with her boyfriend. They seem somewhat happy, he is good to her, his family loves her. It’s a struggle we all deal with, is there such a thing as unconditional love?

One thing I found really interesting was this litmus test idea below, it’ll stick with me. I’m not sure if I know what my defining story is.

“Maya had a theory that everyone had a story that somehow defined them, both the good and the bad, and that these stories should be shared early on in relationships. If the other person appreciated the story, that meant you should proceed with the relationship, and if the other person failed to understand the depth of the story, or were judgmental, then there was basically no point in further contact.”

#184 The Hat- T.C. Boyle

#184 The Hat- T.C. Boyle

Like within a family, personalities are magnified in small communities. You can’t hide, and everyone becomes something of a caricature or a stereotype. This tiny deep mountain community in the Sierras has 27 year-round residents. Jill and Michael are two. Of the 25 others, only 3 were woman, 2 of those were married and old, and the other a drunken walleyed man-hating poetess. So you can imagine, during the long winter months, things could get a bit ornery.

“I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?”

And drink they did, all day and night. Visitors and seasonal residents made things interesting, and so do bears that stalk the food stores of the only bar in town.

Notable Passage: “Her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heavy plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.”

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

#173 Palm Court- James Salter

#173 Palm Court- James Salter

Boy meet girl, they fall in love, and date for three years. Girl meets another boy, marries him. It’s a mistake. They get divorced. Girl calls first boy and they meet up. Too much time has passed. You can never go back again.

Ho-hum. Reading this many short stories, dulls your senses to some themes and story lines. I think this story falls into that category. Not its fault, I guess, but I got nothing out of this.

Rating: 7-5-6-5 Total=23

#148 Cosmopolitan- Akhil Sharma

#148 Cosmopolitan- Akhil Sharma

Gopal Maurya has lost his family. He daughter moved to Germany to live with her boyfriend and his wife left him to follow a guru in India. He treats these events as if they have died, and has become a widower.

“But the swiftness with which the dense absence on the other side of his bed unknotted and evaporated made him wonder whether he ad ever loved his wife.”

He is depressed and has become antisocial:

“At one point, around Christmas, he went to a dinner party, but he did not enjoy it. He found that he was not curious about other people’s lives and did not want to talk about his own.”

When you spend 30 years with someone, and now have nobody there but yourself, life can get confusing. Without work, friends, or a reason to get out of bed, who are you? When a divorcee next door enter Mr. Maurya’s life, things turn around, but for the right reasons?

“He believed that something would soon be said or done to delay Mrs. Shaw’s departure, for certainly God could not leave him alone again.”

The story is a cold one, probably a bit too long for what it had to say.

Rating: 6-5-6-4 Total= 21

#140 Forgotten Dream- Stefan Zweig

#140 Forgotten Dream- Stefan Zweig

For how long do we hold onto old loves, old ideas, old feelings? A past aquaintence stops in for a visit. He says its by chance, but it isn’t. He is there to see his old love one more time, she who has married the “wrong” man. What of those old things they used to know of each other? Sometimes what we feel when we’re young remain only in memory, without regret and without longing.

I had never read Zweig before this. His writing is rich and flowery, perhaps a bit too rich:

“The sweet, light fragrance of a first youthful, half-unspoken love, with all its intoxicating tenderness, had awoken in them like a dream on which you reflect ironically when you wake, although you really wish for nothing more than to dream it again, to live in the dream. The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.”

Passages like this are wonderful, but only if they are a passage, not a page. At some point you have to….make a point. As the story went on, so did the melodramatic phrases:

Peels of happy laughter…little love tokens…half-remembered legends…melancholy solemnity, etc.

It’s like eating a plate full of chocolate fudge without having any milk to wash it down.

Notable Passage: “My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him.”

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