#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

Tim’s father has died and it’s his job to take care of the ashes. His father was intently unsentimental, but Tim finds himself taking stock of his own life and his strained relationship with his dad. He remembers his father coming to visit and taking him to the trails he helped build as a Forest Ranger—and he remembers his father being supremely unimpressed.

“A water bar was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away whether or not it would hold…they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of the mountain staying up…he wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain.”

So the thing Tim is most proud of, the most tangible thing he has done, hadn’t met to his father’s approval. The thing his father was impressed with, briefly, was an old growth tree six feet wide, so that’s where they spread his ashes. I liked the symbolism of the bottle of whiskey saved until Tim got married—wasn’t so hot on the symbolism of the kneeling at the end.

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

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

Allen Feinberg looks down at his $500 shoes he just scuffed and is stricken at how far he has come, or worse how much he has changed. His name changed to Fein, his marriage to a Gentile all come to him with the backdrop of the new, family friendly Times Square that surrounds him.

He sees one of the last remaining “Peep Shows” promising a visual and sensual nirvana for only twenty-five cents. He goes in for the first time since he was a kid. Not much has changed inside that den of lurid desire. But his mind starts playing tricks as the guilt builds up—not only the guilt of being married and going to a peep show, but guilt of how far from his Jewish roots he has strayed. The dancing women turn into his rabbis and his psychologist.

“The rabbis’ return is a lot for him to process. He has worked hard at breaking from their world and he doesn’t remember ever wanting it back.”

All he wanted was a little harmless peek, not of flesh but of his past, of the world that has been left behind, but he finds himself at a spiritual crossroads.

“Where the rabbis are involved, there is always a path to be followed. Either you stay on it or stray into darkness: This is the choice that they offer. And, much as Allen feels bitter and lied to for all these years, he half wishes he could live in their realm, where a man is religious or he is not, a good husband or bad.”

Yes, things have changed, and choices have been made, but the window for your soul will stay open, it doesn’t close—but do you want to go through it or don’t you?

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

#494 The Hammer Man- Toni Cade Bambara

#494 The Hammer Man- Toni Cade Bambara

It is a violent world. The narrator, a school girl, says something mean and unwise to Manny, a big oaf that carries a hammer in his bag and likely is mentally unstable.

“Manny was supposed to be crazy. That was his story. To say you were bad put some people off. But to say you were crazy, you were officially not to be messed with.”

Manny doesn’t care that she’s just a girl, so now, he’s holding vigil outside her house for days ready to kill her when she comes back out. In a predictable but still crazy escalation, the mothers get in a fight because Manny’s mom is almost as crazy as he is; the girls father smashes Manny’s brother’s head into a mail box, Manny’s uncle threatens her father—and somehow Manny falls off the roof, ending the affair.

I guess you could chalk all that up to “it is a violent world”, but later on the girl imagines a world—not far from this one—that is much more violent and much more senseless.

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

#493 Out on Bail- Denis Johnson

#493 Out on Bail- Denis Johnson

This is a drinking take, full of degenerates, crime, and little hope. Johnson is doing his best William Boroughs impersonation. The narrator flashes from memory to memory of his times at the Vine bar and his acquaintance, Jack Hotel that just beat a 25 year prison sentence for robbing a drug dealer. Although not a fantastic story, or an original one for that matter, it does have some nice quotes about drinking.

-Because we all believed we were tragic and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn’t be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

-Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting at a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

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

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

Spurgeon has to bail out his father again from jail. Ray Bivens Junior fancies himself a revolutionary, but he’s nothing more than a dead-beat dad and a hustler. Spurgeon is a great student, never missed a day of school, is the star of the debate team. His father, with no money and a revoked driver’s license convinces him to skip school and the debate match to take his mothers car and drive them to the Million Man March 700 miles away.

At the march he’s pissed-off and argumentative with the older men trying to get him to see the power of the day. All he sees if that his dad forced him to come, not to feel the power of the day, but to sell some rare birds his father stole. All he wants to do is go home, but his dad gets drunk, beats him up, and steals the car—and doesn’t even pay him the money he owes after selling a bird.

This was the point of the day for Spurgeon. His dad can talk about his revolutionary past all he wants, but if you can’t eve be a good father, what’s the point.

“Atoning for one’s wrongs is different from apologizing…one involves words, the other, actions.”

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

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

This was in the 2013 Best American Non-Required Reading under the subheading: Best American Advertisement for a Home Security System. Mike and Julie are a happy young couple managing but barely to eke out their mortgage payments. They come home one day to find an envelope of pictures tacked to a wall inside their home. They didn’t do it themselves, and nobody else has keys:

“The pictures showed a young couple engaged in a series of mundane domestic pursuits—standing together at a sing washing dishes, reading on a couch, playing cards at a dining room table, changing a light bulb in a floor lamp. The problem was that the couple—who were not Mike and Julia—were doing all these things inside Mike and Julie’s house.”

Creeeeeeepy! Makes me think of a Davis Lynch movie. They change locks, call the police, but the pictures keep coming until they move out and eventually break up. Some couple just cant handle the little mysteries of life.

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

#490 Pack Rat Planet- Frank Herbert

#490 Pack Rat Planet- Frank Herbert

Coogan has been recalled to his home planet, where he is the successor to run the library of congress. “It is the repository for all the reported doings of every government in the history of the galaxy.”

He finds out that there is a new government, aptly named the Gentle Ignorance Party run by Leader Adams (don’t you just love the names given by Sci-Fi writers?) This government has sent down a man to investigate the need for a knowledge repository. The Library takes up the whole planet and it’s motto is:

“This planet is devoted to knowledge and research.”

That offends the new government that believes: “Since knowledge is unhappiness, even the word is distasteful when used in a laudatory manner.”

Coogan is promoted when the director is killed by the government, and now it is Coogan’s main focus to save the library and knowledge from decimation. He does so by a clever gambit of semantic and obeisance.

Notable Passage: “Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.”

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