#240 Bulldog- Arthur Miller

#240 Bulldog- Arthur Miller

I would imagine that someone so adapt at being a dramatist would also master the art of short story telling. Which is why I’m surprised that I’ve seen very little of Miller’s short stories.

This one, I guess, is a coming of age story. A thirteen year old Jewish boy from the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn wants to buy a puppy. What ends up happing is a rapid lesson in adulthood.

“He played feeling as though something inside him had sort of shaken loose or collapsed altogether. He was different than he had ever been, not empty and clear anymore but weighted with secrets and his lies, some told and some untold, but all of it disgusting enough to set him slightly outside his family, in a place where he could watch them now, and watch themselves with them.”

Besides the obvious dark, disturbing moment in here, a lot of this is a touching nostalgic look at Brooklyn as a child. The old rickety wooden subways, the kids playing in empty lots on hot weekend days, old baseballs hit over their fence from the amateur league games played in their neighborhood.

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

#239 The Devil and Irv Cherniskie- T.C. Boyle

#239 The Devil and Irv Cherniskie- T.C. Boyle

Irv Cherniskie lives in a rich gated community in Westchester with his unhappy family. While practicing his golf game outside he walks into the nearby woods to fetch a wayward chip shot.

Suddenly the world was not the same. He “felt as is the parameters of the world as we knew it had suddenly shifted. Felt, unaccountably, that he was in deep trouble.”

“It was incredible, it really was. He’d given up on all that God and Devil business the minute he left parochial school….and now here it was, staring him in the face. It took him about thirty seconds to reinvent the world.”

That’s rights, it’s a take about making a deal with Satan. Not fresh, but not un-entertaining. The only issue I have is that there is absolutely nobody here worth reading about. Irv is a despicable man, his wife is a despicable woman, their neighbors by all accounts are despicable as well.

It’s a fine read, and an homage to the legend and all those that came before, but adds nothing to the zeitgeist.

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

#238 Tomorrow is Too Far- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#238 Tomorrow is Too Far- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Childhood tragedy brought on by resentment, favoritism and fate; tragedy that looms over life never to fully clear. Children are very sensitive to knowing they are not loved. When children try to assert themselves in ways that end in accidents, the lesson they learn comes too late.

“His spirit would always hover here. He belonged to this hard earth that had failed to absorb the shock of his fall. He belonged to the trees here, one of which had let go of him.”

After the death of her cousin caused by her prodding, the narrator’s life would never be that innocent, but perhaps that was for the best. “…something had to happen to Nonso, so that you could survive. Even as ten you knew that some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.”

The truth about the cause of death was never apparent, and in the aftermath, this ambiguity tore the family apart. Once children played together at grandma’s house, as a family. Now, nobody is close. That’s the ultimate heartbreak, one that can only be lived with alone.

Notable Passage: “The snake she had in her yard was called the ‘echi eteka,’ Tomorrow Is Too Far. One bite…and it’s all over in ten minutes.”

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

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

Nobody writes discovery better than Kerouac; discovery, adventure, wonder, and the enlightenment of youth. This is not a true short story, but it’s worthy of a look. Like a lot of what Kerouac writes, this is part fiction, part memoir, part manifesto.

“You embark upon the Voyage, face eager, eyes aflame with the passion of traveling, spirits brimming with gaiety, levity, and a flamboyant carelessness that tries to conceal the wild delight with which this mad venture fills you. You sit in the train, and you begin to feel yourself eased away, away, away…and the gray home town is left behind, the prosaic existence of 18 years is now being discarded into the receptacle of time.”

What could be more romantic a notion than traveling away from home at eighteen? The excitement and kinetic mind of Kerouac makes you want to immediately drop your things and hit the road, anyway…just go, man, go. Reading Kerouac always reminds me how much I love reading, traveling, living. There will never be another like him.

Rating: 7-8-8-10 Total=33

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

The narrator and her parents are on a cruise to the mouth of the Amazon to see Halley’s comet. The mother believes upon seeing this sight, she will die.

“This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open.”

She never got to see the comet due to sickness, but then, or because of that she didn’t die either. The viewing for the other passengers were said to be the worst visibility of the comet in 2,000 years. However, even after trekking into the jungle with tri-pods, and heavy gear, nobody left disappointed.

It’s funny. Sometimes you read something and can imagine it in another voice. Hempel always reads to me as genuine, and straight forward. Even when she’s writing something funny or ironic, it doesn’t have a biting edge. That’s hers style and it’s wonderful. However, reading this story about 45 taxis (out of the whole country’s 47) taking old people into the interior of a tropical island to barely see a comet--one whole taxi used to carry a portable toilet—I imagine the buffoonery that would spew out of the pen of someone like T.C Boyle or better yet, Hunter S. Thompson.

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

#235 Nachman From Los Angeles- Leonard Michaels

#235 Nachman From Los Angeles- Leonard Michaels

This is a clever piece about metaphysics. Nachman is tricked by his friend to write a paper for Ali, who is willing to pay him a thousand dollars. Ali is a Persian prince, handsome, rich and persuasive.

“A line had been crossed. Nachman hadn’t noticed when he crossed it. Maybe Ali had crossed the line so that, to Nachman’s surprise, it now lay behind rather than in front of him.”

While he learns about Metaphysics, his field normally being mathematics, Ali takes him to an expensive dinner flaunting his riches and power. The conversation they have is contentious: “The conversation was more like a game of ping-pong than a fight with knives, and yet the hostility was obvious.”

The story itself becomes an exercise in metaphysics. After conversing with and experience life with someone like Ali, “Nachman felt that he was on the verge of grasping the complexities at the highest levels of the universe.” But then “he’d made Nachman feel meaningless. The idea of himself as meaningless compared with Ali made Nachman chuckle.”

The paper doesn’t get written down, as if the act of recording it will nullify its very existence, but if willed hard enough it still may appear.

Word of the Day: Invidious – likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others. (Google)

Notable Passage: “Love isn’t funny. Love is an example of what’s real.”

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