Wolff’s work couldn’t be more different from what we think of as Raymond Carver’s (“Leviathan” being a notable exception). I mean this as a compliment – the stories assembled in “Our Story Begins” are told with a patient, steady hand that manages to avoid overly sparse or idiosyncratic tricks of language. Though on the surface these characters are just as doomed and hapless as Carver’s, Wolff manages in many cases to mine some buried vein of hope that pulls the narrative back from the brink of total despair.

Take “Desert Breakdown, 1968”, where a pregnant Krystal is left stranded in a shady desert backwater with her toddler son. Surrounded by threatening locals who may or may not have violence on their minds, Krystal finally realizes about her husband: “Mark was not there. As if she had really believed he would be there. Krystal kicked the wall with her bare foot. The pain made clear what she had been pretending not to know: that he had never really been there and never would be there in any way that mattered.” Inspired by this insight and empowered by her anger, Krystal manages to assert herself and gain the upper hand in what had seemed like a hopeless situation.

This is the kind of emotional epiphany we often want – and fail to receive – from the typical minimalist American short story. While Carver and Williams and other proponents of dirty realism might leave us breathless with despair, sucker-punched in the gut by banality or horror, Wolff allows his characters to move beyond the paralysis imposed by circumstance and move on. This is true even in the face of certain death, as in the wonderful “Bullet in the Brain”. In it, a man’s life flashes before his eyes in the microseconds after being shot in the head:

It’s true that this collection is fueled by the threat of violence, fear, and loneliness. Wolff understands that this tension is required to keep us reading. We are human, after all … every one of us will die some day. This is enough of horror, Wolff seems to argue. In the meanwhile, why not make time to sit together around the campfire and tell a few tall tales?

This is honest, empathetic, heartfelt storytelling. It’s fitting that the author includes us – the reader – right in the title of his collection. These are “our” stories, indeed.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Barry Hannah’s “Geronimo Rex” reads with the breathless intensity of a skydiver’s plummet to the earth. Published in 1972, the story was Hannah’s first novel, and was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973. It tells the scattered but hilarious tale of young Harry Monroe as he tries to navigate the raunchy and troubled swirl of his adolescence in Dream of Pines, Louisiana during the 1960s. Hannah, whose off-kilter stylistic sensibilities were displayed so brilliantly in the short story collection “Airships”, pulls no punches in this first-person account of a bigoted yet big-hearted youth trying to make sense of the changes sweeping over a South besotted by its own flawed conception of self.

The story begins with young Harry Monroe watching the Dream of Pines marching band practice on the football field. Hannah’s prose approaches something resembling religious fervor when he writes about music:

As you can see, Hannah is no stranger to hyperbole. And while the story grows increasingly offbeat and cartoonish as the novel progresses, the cumulative effect of Hannah’s impossibly comic metaphors is transfixing. There is very little in the way of what might be called plot here: Harry Monroe outgrows Dream of Pines, where “we had teachers quitting all the time for reasons of pregnancy, higher pay in the insurance field, or personal despair.” Harry heads to college, becomes fixated with the idea that he is some whitebread reincarnation of Geronimo, and together with his roommate tries to dispense a hamhanded kind of justice to a white supremacist peripherally involved in the murder of Medgar Evars. Along the way Harry half-heartedly tries his hand at music, falls in and out of an immature brand of love, gets married, and realizes that the colored bandleader named Harley Butte might be the only hero he’s ever known.

Butte seems to me the real center of this book, and I wondered why Hannah did not spend more pages on his story. A musical genius, a child of the South struggling to maintain his musical integrity against the flood of rock-and-roll mediocrity sweeping the nation, Butte is a doomed symbol of the South these characters wax nostalgic about:

Hannah’s disjointed rebel yell of a story proves that the written word – even at its most obscene and discomfiting – has a power that cannot be denied. Or, in the words of Harry Monroe: “The band to me was like a river tearing down a dam when they played, and you just don’t hang around finding out what’s imperfect when that happens.”

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Professor David Lurie’s soul is indeed empty. A middling poetry professor in Cape Town, South Africa, Lurie is filled with desire but lacking in passion, the key ingredient to unlocking the great works he explicates to his young, glassy-eyed students. Twice divorced, fifty-two years old, and estranged from his daughter Lucy, Lurie “has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” But after being abandoned by his favorite escort, Lurie seduces a young student of his, and the not-so-consensual sex between them becomes a big problem for the teacher.

Lurie is fired from his post and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the South African countryside. Lucy is an old soul, a gentle and understanding spirit who trains and kennels dogs alongside neighbors who have, until very recently, been subjected to decades of dehumanizing treatment under apartheid. Then, in a shocking act of violence, three men invade Lucy’s home, gang rape her, and set her father on fire with lighter fluid.

Though the physical wounds heal quickly, both father and daughter spend the remainder of this novel wading through the emotional aftermath of the attack. In spare and surprisingly non-political prose, Coetzee explores the double-edged sword that is power. Lurie’s near-rape of the student in Cape Town, where he is a powerful but apathetic teacher, could be an allegory of South Africa under apartheid. But out in the post-apartheid countryside the dynamics have been reversed, and it is his daughter who must atone for the older man’s sins.

This is a difficult, and wonderfully-constructed story – deceptively easy to read, every sentence weighted with some double meaning. Coetzee wisely skirts any overtly political analysis of his homeland. He is more concerned with the power of language to make sense of – and justify, and enable, and hide, and wonder at, and atone for – the disgraceful acts of human history. The written word can be used to codify our worst natures, as was done under apartheid.

Or it can serve as a warning, a judgment, and an example to future generations:

Lurie is unable to evade the judgment inherent in Byron’s poem. His lecture on Lucifer brushes too closely against the hem of his own irrational nature, foreshadowing the lonely hermit he will become.

Coetzee does have his flawed and aging antihero develop a stunted sort of empathy in the later stages of the book. We are asked to feel sorry for Lurie in his new calling – euthanizing sick and abandoned dogs in the South African countryside. But it will not be possible for the reader to love him.

There is a limit, after all, to sympathy.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Williams has said of her fiction that “the conundrum of literature is that it’s not supposed to say anything”. Unable or unwilling to articulate a source for their existential angst, the characters in Escapes wander blind through a kind of moral vacuum, stumbling past any sign of a unifying force – like intimacy, passion, or faith – that might help them rise above misfortune.

Take the emotionally immature Lucy in the brilliant story “Rot”. Lucy’s much older husband buys an antique car rusting from the core (“Rot like this cannot be stayed”, a strangely prophetic old mechanic tells the couple). Lucy argues that the car “was meant to know the open road … I think we should drive it till it drops.” But the husband has fetishized this memento to his lost youth, and ends up demolishing a wall to install the decaying automobile in their living room. In the end, Lucy understands that she is beginning to outgrow her husband when she can say, with real certainty, “I never did want to be a part of everything”.

Lucy’s realization, which is framed in opposition to some oppressive force, is typical of the epiphanies here. It’s enlightenment by exclusion. Indeed, the first word spoken by a narrator in this collection is “No.” It will take these characters an eternity to uncover what they want, approaching life in this fashion. Meanwhile, they practice a rough-and-tumble sort of affection, one “of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.”

And the lies help them survive. In the lovely story “The Skater”, young Molly is visiting boarding schools with her shell-shocked parents. We learn that Molly’s sister has died recently. In “The Skater”, the author presents us with a world that, by its very design, dooms its denizens to destruction: “In mythical stories, it seems, there were two ways to disaster. One of the ways was to answer an unanswerable question. The other was to fail to answer an unanswerable question.”

You’re screwed either way, it seems. And so rather than answer the unanswerable, these characters lie to themselves and to one another. Their fictions offer a freedom real life won’t allow, as Molly describes in “The Skater”, after telling a minor fib about her dead sister to a potential classmate:

“The Skater” ends with a beautiful image. Molly’s father Tom has gone down into a cellar looking for a whiskey glass, where he stumbles on an old skating rink beside a frozen lake. He is soon joined by his wife Annie:

Despite Williams’ proscriptions about fiction, she seems to be saying something of real import with these sad, moving little stories. Loneliness and despair cast long shadows over the possibility of any real, or sustained, sense of joy. But the tender moments shine that much brighter for all the surrounding darkness.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Hempel’s stories reflect a discontent with the traditional view of narrative: a product (the story), produced by one person (the writer), for consumption by another (the reader). This dynamic is too one-sided for Hempel. Language itself is a kind of a lie, Hempel argues, an abstraction of reality. And she’s trying to show us something real about ourselves. The author can only do that by transcending language, and involving us in the story.

And so logic is turned on its head. Phrases are turned inside out, love is turned into loss, and the reader is turned into a kind of voyeuristic co-author. Here is Hempel addressing us directly, in the final paragraphs of her short story “The Harvest”: “The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?”

This metafictional gambit is either annoying or genius, depending on your point of view. If the former, maybe you get angry and stop reading Amy Hempel. If the latter, maybe you go back and examine whether your assumptions about the narrator were tinged by her loose morals. But in both cases it accomplishes the author’s purpose, which is to reach past the veil of the narrative and force you into a relationship with the “you” from five minutes ago.

This interplay between the psyche and the body is a recurrent theme in Hempel’s stories. We are fragile beings trapped inside strange and wonderful bodies. And while the body might recover from trauma or injury relatively quickly, the mind keeps circling back to it. We are always adding footnotes to past experience, reshaping memories, tricked by our selves into making sense out of nonsense. “Nothing is a long time ago”, Hempel argues in her story “The Afterlife”.

And if our brains are tricksters, then love is a cruel kind of joke, an illusion which the author is slow to embrace. Hempel’s narrators are often voyeuristic third wheels, cracking one-liners from the sidelines as a relationship slides slowly off the rails. Or writing letters to someone who will never respond. Or recounting steamy stories to self-involved lovers who care only about the words, and not about the person doing the telling. Darkly funny stories about love losing itself, Hempel knows, are more revealing than the other kind, the make-believe stories we tell one another about true love.

“There is an almost unbridgeable gulf between what an artist sees and what an artist paints,” Hempel writes in “Offertory”. We graft our experience onto reality, and in so doing make fiction out of life. Art is an extreme example of this phenomenon. But it’s happening all the time, and once you’re aware of it, watching the process at work can be either horrifying, or gratifying, or both. Much like these stories.

“Offertory” is the final story in this collection, written more recently than the others. In it, Hempel comes to terms with the idea that affection – and our experience – is a metafictional construct. The narrator here is in a somewhat sad relationship with a man – an artist – who can only get excited when she talks about the threesome she had with a married couple, years ago:

Hempel could almost be describing her relationship with the reader here. Doomed and distant accomplices, trying to discover something new about the world, and themselves. Can love be trusted? Is it “true”? Probably not, says the author. But sometimes proximity can approximate passion, and in the end Hempel seems to choose the comfort of a stranger over solitude:

Keep talking, Amy.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Gilead is told in two distinct sections. The action unfolds in Gilead, Iowa in 1957. In the first half of the novel, we learn that John Ames’ had a wife and daughter who both died in childbirth. Decades later, Ames falls in love with Lila, an uneducated and much younger woman. Like his father and grandfather before him, John Ames is a preacher. He baptizes Lila, they are married, and at the age of sixty-nine Ames has a son with his new bride.

Ames sketches the town’s early days as a haven for abolitionists in the late nineteenth century. Grandfather Ames was a follower and protector of John Brown, and lost an eye in the bloody skirmishes leading up to the Civil War, leaving him half-blind. But the elder Ames’ militant actions and fiery sermons ended in violence and death for many in his congregation, causing a generational rift in the Ames family. This idea of inherited, original sin becomes the bedrock upon which Robinson constructs the gripping psychological drama that will unfold in the novel’s second half.

Ames initially presents himself as the perfect father figure: calm, reasonable, tender, forgiving. His wife and son are idealized in his thoughts and prayers. With a philosopher’s powers of perception, Ames is trying to show his young son the light that has guided him for so many years:

Ames loves his infant son unconditionally. Or so it seems. But the preacher’s equanimity feels less than honest. He’s holding something back. We soon discover that another man carries John Ames’ name – the young John Ames “Jack” Boughton. Jack is the son of Ames’ best friend, the ailing Presbyterian minister Reverend Robert Boughton. And Jack’s back in town to visit his own dying father.

Jack is the proverbial prodigal son, a recovering alcoholic with a mean streak who seems to ruin everything he touches. In his youth, Jack Boughton had an illegitimate young daughter who died from neglect – a sin our narrator refuses to forgive. Even the mention of Jack’s name is enough to send Reverend Ames into paroxysms of doubt and anger.

Within a few pages of meeting Jack Boughton we understand that John Ames is facing the most important struggle of his life. The love Ames professes for his own son can only be truly unconditional if the preacher can find a way to love, and forgive, young Jack Boughton for his youthful transgressions.

If the first portion of the reverend’s diary gives us a glimpse at the light of his steady and simple faith, the next is a complicated exploration of his doubts and misgivings. It is not a journey our narrator accepts willingly. The preacher often tries – and fails – to communicate with young Jack, cowed by his failing health and lifelong animus toward the young man. But time is running short, and a failure to be honest with himself, with his son, and with the reader will have repercussions for Ames’ very soul:

It is not enough to embrace the light, Robinson argues. This is only part of the picture. Those who never use that light to illuminate the shadows are walking through life like Ames’ grandfather, half-blind. Even the darkest hearts are beautiful, and worthy of God’s unconditional love. If we are up to the truly heroic task of looking past our own shortsighted selves, the author argues, we will be rewarded with the gift of real sight.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

“Round two,” the waitress said. She delivered three perspiring mugs of beer and a basket of chicken wings. “Just how old are you kids, anyway?”

The boy opened his mouth to answer.

“They’re twins,” the man said. “Going back to college soon.”

The waitress eyed them all sideways.

“It’s fine,” the man said. “They’re mine.”

The waitress disappeared.

“You said back.”

The man ignored this. He raised his glass. “Drink up.”

The girl pulled a face. “It tastes like hairspray.”

“You get used to it.”

The boy belched. His sister laughed.

“I’m hungry,” the boy said. He reached for the food.

“Drink first,” the man said. “Then eat. That’s how it’s done.”

The three of them drank.

“Don’t ever have more than two of these,” said the man. “You could find yourself in trouble real quick.”

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said.

“You’ve heard of the buddy system?” said the man. “Never go into a place like this alone.”

“My face is tingling,” the boy said.

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said again.

The man fell silent.

“Men aren’t worth a damn,” the man finally said.

“I am,” the boy said.

The boy downed his beer. He tore into a chicken wing. His father looked at him.

“Not a one of us,” said the man.

“Is he telling the truth?” the girl asked her brother.

The boy chewed his food.

“Drink up,” the man said to his daughter.

“I don’t want to,” the girl said.

“You need to understand how this feels,” said the man. He tried flagging the cocktail waitress down.

The girl crossed her arms. “What happens if we do get into trouble?”

“Call me,” said the man.

“You’ll be three counties away.”

“I’ll come anyway.”

“And if this buddy system of yours doesn’t work?”

“It will,” said the man.

“If it doesn’t?” the girl said.

The man considered this.

The girl pushed her chair away from the table. “I’m ready to leave.”

The man didn’t answer. He offered the girl his wallet.

“Pay up,” said the man. “I’ll drive you both back to my place.”

The girl stood. She didn’t take the wallet. She looked at her brother.

“It’s the truth,” said the boy. “What he said. More or less.”

“Which is it?” the girl said.

The boy didn’t answer.

The girl walked away.

The man watched her go.

(This story was originally published in Zouch Magazine)

The recently published Library of America collection of Carver’s work, Collected Stories, gathers multiple drafts of the authors’ more memorable stories together, including the full manuscripts of Beginners and WWTA. In his early days, Carver’s work was dark, depressing, even murderous at times. Babies are killed by squabbling parents, men murder their wives and sisters, alcoholism runs rampant, and infidelity offers more intimacy than the brutality of the marriages described here. Carver was a practicing alcoholic in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the tales he wrote during this time reflect the hopelessness and despair which drove him to drink.

Lish saw in Carver’s stories “a particular bleakness”, took the emerging author under his wing, and championed his work with the New York literary establishment. Lish edited and published Carver’s initial short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet Please, in 1976. Then in 1977 Carver went on the wagon. He divorced his first wife, moved in with the woman who would become his second wife, and started a daily regimen of writing that would continue until his death, in 1988, of lung cancer.

In Beginners we see a man and an author struggling to come to terms with his past. Where his earlier stories were barebones set pieces highlighting the more disturbing aspects of suburban, working-class life, the stories Carver wrote after 1977 are more nuanced. The characters in Beginners still struggle with death and guilt and divorce and depression. They wonder where things might have gone wrong. But many of Carver’s initial drafts also describe people attempting to rebuild their lives, seeking some sort of meaning in a savage universe.

In May of 1980 Carver delivered what he considered to be the final manuscript of Beginners to Lish in New York City. Several of the stories had been published before. Indeed, Lish had previously edited many of them. Lish read the manuscript, reached out to Carver, and asked if he could tighten the collection as a whole. Carver told him “not to worry about taking a pencil to the stories if you can make them better.”

Five weeks later Lish mailed Carver the revised manuscript, freshly edited and renamed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver did not read the manuscript, and the book was put on “the fast track” for publication. Lish continued editing, assuming from Carver’s vague reply that everything was moving ahead as planned.

The editor continued to work. He cut Carver’s total word count by 55%, removing what he saw as “false sentimentality” to “foreground the bleakness”. Lish removed entire pages of text, saving a word here, a phrase there. One story was cut by a whopping 78%. Lish added hard-hitting and insightful lines of dialogue, characterization and setting. He changed the names of characters. He wrote new (and now famous) lines. He changed titles, tone, effect, endings. He changed everything.

When Raymond Carver finally got around to reading the manuscript, he was understandably floored. He wrote Lish a frantic, heartfelt letter asking to be released from his book contract. The letter is reproduced in the Library of America collection, and in it Carver says:

There is and will continue to be a longstanding debate over Lish’s role in Carver’s career. On one side of the fence, there are those who believe that Lish’s editorial license was a toxic sort of power grab. Stephen King called it “baleful”, and said of Lish’s work on the story “The Bath” (which was originally titled “A Small Good Thing”) that it had been “a cheat.” On the other side, there are those who say that the differences reveal in Gordon Lish a particular kind of brilliance. The New York Review of Books said: “The publication of ‘Beginners’ has not done Carver any favors. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish.”

Having now read them all, I believe Gordon Lish took good stories, then transformed them into brilliant and haunting works of art. Carver was just beginning his recovery from a desperate life. He was reinventing himself as a man and author. But the sentiments he was exploring had yet to be fully realized. He seemed to be writing in order to heal his own tortured soul. But Carver was just starting to heal, just beginning. Whereas the horror and despair were still evident, waiting like a cancer for someone to come along, cut them out, and hold them up to the light.

After WWTA secured Carver’s fame and fortune, he asserted new control over his relationship with Lish. Lish eventually broke off their relationship, and Carver went on to explore his newfound sobriety in one heartfelt story after the next. “Cathedral”, about a blind man who teaches an insensitive husband the concept of empathy, is such a story. Carver had finally matured – as a man, a husband, and author – and “Cathedral” might be his finest tale in the collection.

Artists create for many reasons. Editors revise for many more. But in the end, readers don’t really care about the reasons. Readers want to be entertained, titillated, shocked. They want stories that stick with them for days and months and years later.

Carver’s sparse stories, as edited by Lish, do just that.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

I’ve just turned 40 years old. It was a tougher birthday than most, and I want to be alone. So I’m headed for a sports bar called Humperdinks to watch Manny Pacquiao go toe-to-toe with Manuel Márquez for the WBO Welterweight Championship of the World …

You can read the rest of this essay at The Morning News.

O’Brien’s tales play fast and loose with the facts. At times he uses real names, assuring the reader he has received permission from his old war buddies. At other times the plots can veer freakishly off into the realm of horror or genre fiction. And just when we think we’ve gotten our bearings, O’Brien tells us he’s been messing with our heads all along: “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

What is true is that, as a young man, Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War. He considered fleeing to Canada, but found that his sense of shame wouldn’t let him go through with it. And so the author went to war because he was ashamed not to. He became close friends with the soldiers in his unit. He fought. He cowered. He saw people die. He might have killed someone. And when he came back, Tim O’Brien began to write, trying to wrap his mind around the paradox that was Vietnam. “War is hell,” O’Brien writes, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

In the title story, “The Things They Carried”, the author inventories the belongings of every soldier in his unit, mementos and photographs and toothbrushes and weapons and “pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.” The inventory moves quickly from a listing of physical objects to the awful weight of the war, the guilt and shame and depression and rage that these soldiers will carry for the rest of their lives, assuming they make it back home.

Once home, O’Brien writes stories as a kind of talk therapy. In a combat zone, the author argues, imagination can get you killed. The soldier needs to be present, aware, on constant alert. Stateside, though, imagination can bring the dead back to life, heal psychic wounds, and begin to spin a more resonant emotional truth from the chaos. Below is the entire text of one of the stories in this collection, entitled “Good Form”:

A recurring theme in this collection is the big fish story. Soldiers in war tell whoppers: ghost stories, battle stories, stories about getting laid, stories about what it will be like to get home, stories about dreams and nightmares they’ve had. They tell the stories in order to bond with one another, in order to calm themselves down, in order to capture the horrible essence of their predicament in the combat zone. As the author continued to rely upon this frame tale technique, I was reminded of Scheherazade, the storyteller in “One Thousand and One Nights”, stringing her executioner along with one imaginative tale after the next. Like Scheherazade, Tim O’Brien guides the reader through an increasingly enchanting dreamscape with each successive story in this collection. It’s a place where long-gone friends come back from the dead. It’s a place “where miracles can happen.” It’s a place where the weak have a voice, and where wrongs can be made right.

O’Brien writes here as if his life depended upon it. And in the end, it does: “I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.