I, Tonya (2017)

Portland figure skater Tonya Harding and "the incident," as the attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan is referred to in this insanely entertaining movie—and of course the reason we are all here—represented a historical turning point for me in American life, in the wake of Amy Fisher's murder of Mary Jo Buttafuoco. I vividly remember seeing the cover of Newsweek with Nancy Kerrigan's crying face and the headline "Why Me?" It felt like going down a rabbit hole. I didn't understand why at the time. These things took place in January of 1994, playing the overture for what turned out to be a year that never stopped being bizarre, usually in ways congenial to blowing up tabloid celebrity media into more like what we know today. It went from this story to Kurt Cobain's suicide to the OJ Simpson double murder to Michael Jackson marrying Lisa Marie Presley to the baseball strike (first year in decades with no World Series) and finally ending on the Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich and a propaganda machine that was only going to get better. Heck, even Guy Debord punched his own clock late in the year, as if he recognized the arrival at last of the real society of the spectacle and didn't want anything to do with it. I think I'm forgetting a few things too. Most of these wild and woolly tales—certainly Harding, Cobain, Simpson, and Jackson/Presley—played remarkably well on 24-hour cable news, by which I mean played constantly. They represented cultural reckonings of one kind and another. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan heralded the class conflict whose name we must not speak. In the vernacular, the way I remember people talking about it at the time, it was a case of White Trash versus White Bread. The one side breaks kneecaps like they've seen in the movies, the other wails, "Why meeee?" (implication: no problem if it's someone else). Director Craig Gillespie (The Finest Hours, Million Dollar Arm) previously worked this effectively, with such gleefully riffing energy on Our Strange Culture, 10 years ago in Lars and the Real Girl. I, Tonya is just as supercharged with energy, this time mimicking the static talking-heads style of modern low-budget documentaries like Crazy Love and talhotblond, which above all depend on the details of their stories.

So maybe the freewheeling documentary style is fooling me, but until I hear differently I'm accepting the facts as given in I, Tonya, which among other things include Harding (Margot Robbie, in a first-rate performance) straight-up declaring she and Kerrigan had been friends who roomed together (and partied together) in previous skating competitions. I, Tonya is hagiography but of a type I've never seen before, outside of possibly only Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst. It's not making a hero of Tonya Harding nor is it excusing what happened to Kerrigan (though that is downplayed quite a bit, likely for the sake of keeping audience sentiment on Harding's side). In fact, it shows Harding making excuses all the time—nothing is ever her fault. The story is rooted in serious, real, and even tragic events like abuse and domestic violence, but the elements are painfully buffoonish. These people! Like Donald Trump, they should be hilarious, and if you can get far enough away to avoid fallout, they even are hilarious. The clowns and fools who surrounded Tonya Harding, the whole story of the attack on Kerrigan and what it was supposed to be and what it became, is choice stupidity of highest grade. You will laugh, even though it hurts to laugh. Then there is Tonya Harding and her mother (Allison Janney, another great performance), a story I hadn't known at all. Again, I'm accepting at face value what I got from this movie. There are exaggerations and obfuscations but they are obvious and have their purpose. If this was the kind of mother Harding had and this is a fair approximation of their relationship, then, well, it explains a lot (and reminds me of scenes from the documentary Streetwise, another Pacific Northwest classic). More generally, I take the things in I, Tonya as the coming of our current problems, with truth, stupidity, and all related issues, the new American way—and Fox News didn't even exist yet. Which reminds me, I have to wonder what Fox News Nation makes of Tonya Harding and/or this movie at this point. She might be one of their heroes, or she might be considered too liberal. You never know! Anecdotally, here in the PNW she is still reflexively taken as some kind of hero who got some kind of bad deal. I'm sympathetic to the view myself, and I, Tonya actually firms me up on the point ("some kind" being the key qualifier). Tonya Harding got more than her fair share of the lumps in this case and like Patty Hearst in Patty Hearst she's here to say, "Fuck 'em. Fuck them all." See this movie as soon as possible for further details.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Another slave narrative that was shorter than I expected—about a hundred printed pages. Frederick Douglass (who is being recognized more and more) escaped from slavery in Maryland when he was about 20, and then lived a long life as an abolitionist leader and statesman. This was written in 1845, when he was in his late 20s. Already his voice is different from the previous narratives in my chronological reading, much more authoritatively intellectual, and also an impatient man of action. Most refreshing for me was his scorn of religion—even specifying all Christianity in North America. His contempt is bracing, and tonic. You feel the rage of a man toward slaveholders, earned through personal experience. And, as seems common with many who survived to write, his experience is mild compared to many. For a long time, as a boy, Douglass was able to escape the brutality of lashings and beatings, but not always. One interesting insight he has is the transformation of a couple who had never owned slaves and then inherited some. As always, it's striking how casually slaves are treated explicitly as property. Some of the dehumanizing treatment, such as the separation of family members, seemed aimed at exactly that—dehumanizing them to make them better workers. Douglass's arguments are interesting, reminiscent of anti-torture arguments people make now, about how the dehumanization occurs on both sides, on the torturer as well as the tortured, on the slaveholder as much as the slave. It's probably true but it's hard to understand because it's counterintuitive. So Douglass describes the couple who inherit slaves as originally kind and decent who gradually become monsters of their household. Spanking children is still defended today, so it's not hard to imagine how people rationalized abusing slaves. It was doubtless for the good of the slaves and all that. I think this narrative has to be particularly taken as coming with an agenda, but I also suspect there's little exaggeration. Again, simple facts such as the inability of slaves to testify as witnesses in legal proceedings—precluded from it by law—give the game away. Why would you have a statute like that? And more importantly, can you imagine the power that would give you over another person? What actually surprises me most in these narratives (after the bald facts of slavery itself) are the numbers of decent white people who actually have the courage to act. The majorities in the 19th century who went along with slavery look more like the sad victims of human psychology we see today believing every word of Fox News. Treating slaves as reasonably valuable property, say the value of a car today, is exactly what made the problem so intractable for white majorities over and over again. Not to mention the racism, of course. This is one of the best ones I've read yet.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Tago Mago (1971)

There's no end of informative details and anecdotes about this classic so-called "krautrock" double LP by Can, straight out of the classic rock era. The obvious forebears are Bitches Brew and Ummagumma. Many argue for it as the influential band's best. The webzine Drowned in Sound once hailed it as the single most influential rock album ever made (doubtless aware of the Velvet Underground's banana album and brazenly challenging its accepted supremacy). Bobby Gillespie, of the Jesus and Mary Chain and later Primal Scream, characterized the album as "not American, not rock 'n' roll, but mysterious and European." It was recorded in a castle in Germany where the members of Can were living rent-free for a year. They discovered the first-time vocalist, Japanese national Damo Suzuki, busking on the streets. It's tempting to take it beyond European and label it Axis, but that's not fair. No doubt they are all democrats. Still, Aleister Crowley has something to do with Tago Mago, and the marshalled forces of light and darkness are referred to frequently in descriptions. Dreamy and grinding, with a heavy bottom, an unusual approach to vocals, and much space for air, this music is frankly hard to describe. The mood is stiff, Teutonic, bashing, yet capable of both laying in a groove and of floating free and weightless. There's a lead guitar (Michael Karoli) but it's generally on equal terms with the rhythm section. Off to the side is an erratic vocalist. Tago Mago is often marked by special effects of editing and splicing, Teo Macero style. "Oh Yeah" (7:22) starts with the vocal track running backward, and most of these pieces are stitched together from multiple sessions. There's well over an hour of music spread across seven tracks—two alone are whole album sides each and generally my favorites here because they so generously offer so much space in which to roam. "Halleluhwah" clarifies the powers of redundancy in rhythm, pushing Holger Czukay's bass and Jaki Liebezeit's pounding toms to the front—a piece of funk, studied and leaden in a way that paradoxically makes it work better. The other long one, "Aumgn," is much more instrumental and experimental, mysterious and full of strange sounds on which the mind easily projects: animals, wind, water, heavy machinery. Groaning. It's psychedelic in the dark vein pursued by Acid Mothers Temple—a head trip, sometimes making me slightly uneasy. These are good people, aren't they? They certainly have powers. On the matter of light versus darkness, the prevailing sense for me is that the first half (album/disc) is more of the former and the second more of the latter. Or, this works for me too, the potent churning rhythmic elements represent dark elemental forces of deep woods and jungles (at night with bonfires), with the pieces of melody and arrangements as innocent creatures of the realm in the light of day. Bucolic daytime woods scenes alternating with howling Witches' Sabbath bacchanalias at night. It must be winter in this album because there's generally more dark and it's cold. For all its freewheeling energy, it's clinical. Tago Mago is proof that anything can happen from a castle in Germany where you live rent-free.

Baby Doll (1956)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writer: Tennessee Williams
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Kenyon Hopkins
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman

Director Elia Kazan made Baby Doll right after two of his most famous movies, On the Waterfront and East of Eden, and right before another interesting curiosity, A Face in the Crowd, which uses a monster Andy Griffith as a certain type of charismatic Southern authoritarian politician (think Donald Trump in good old boy drag). In some ways the success of those earlier movies appears to have opened a vein of experimentation for Kazan. Baby Doll is also the first of only a few original screenplays by Tennessee Williams, who mostly stuck to the theater, though by 1956 he had adapted a few of his own plays for the screen, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Rose Tattoo. For the most part the air of alcoholism and hysterical tones of Williams's work—all that unsympathetic Southern gallantry and desperation—usually loses me quickly. I know they're still working out the trauma of losing a war to defend slavery down there, hence the Confederate flags, statuary, etc., but already it's almost a hundred years here (and now it's more like 150 and they're still not over it).

Even so, something about this nifty collaboration with Kazan has kept me coming back for more. Probably, yeah, the raw charge of sexuality is part of it, a shot across the bow of the coming sexual liberation, written by a gay man. It's a strange and compelling movie, with one of Eli Wallach's greatest performances, which is saying a lot, especially given that this is his feature debut in a long and illustrious career.

"A Red-Letter Day" (1948)

Story by Elizabeth Taylor not available online.

Elizabeth Taylor's story is sharply observed but dated to the extent that some of its plot points likely no longer register the same way. Tory is a young single mother on visiting day at the boarding school her son attends. She sees a maternal woman who is there to visit her multiple sons and resents her—resents, we surmise, the older woman's greater comfort with being a mother, having a successful marriage, or just in general. Tory got pregnant the first time she had sex, married the man, and is now divorced from him. Her feelings about her son Edward are not conventionally maternal. It's not even clear that she cares about him, though it's also not clear that she doesn't. Certainly she has poignant feelings for him, in an abstracted way. They are uncomfortable together and it is a long day for both of them. Most of the time Tory seems to be focused on the maternal woman, Mrs. Hay-Hardy, and dwelling on her "womb": "she looked as if she had what is often called a teeming womb," for example. The contrast is stark if obvious and Mrs. Hay-Hardy recurs throughout the story. Mostly it says inside Tory's head but occasionally we see things from Edward's view. He is 11 and, while not any more comfortable than Tory about the visit, he doesn't seem that needy either. If anything, he seems reasonably happy and adjusted to boarding school life. It's possible he will eventually need therapy or have problems as an adult, but he seems fine now, which in some ways implicitly argues she's doing OK as a mother. But I don't think that's supposed to be the point of this story. This is more along the lines of proto-feminism, underlining the limitations women are subjected to. It's plain Tory never wanted the responsibilities of a child, at least not on these terms. She hates her ex-husband and doesn't react well when Edward tries to bring him up. So she's a person with anger and resentments, and I think the way these feelings confuse her about her own motherhood is intended to be a little shocking. That's mostly what feels dated. We know better now that the life of a single mother is not an easy one, and often leads to bitterness for perfectly understandable reasons. I'm not sure we're intended to like Tory much, but I think it's easier than ever to identify with her now. I think it's even possible this story is about one very bad day—we all have them—and everything worked out fine for her. Or, anyway, as fine as possible for a woman in her time.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Blood Will Out (2014)

Novelist, critic, and essayist Walter Kirn's pained recollections of his friendship with the serial imposter "Clark Rockefeller," who was later found out and ultimately convicted of homicide, is most interesting to me for showing ways that victims in such crimes collaborate in being fooled. Kirn has much sympathy for these victims, being one himself, and it is actually a good bit more than just a convenient extension of self-pity. The case reminds me a little of a similar situation, though far less intense, that I saw with a friend in college. This friend, who I will call "Gus," was from South Dakota but had convinced all of us he was a wealthy UK citizen, mainly by speaking with a loose mid-Atlantic accent like Cary Grant and salting his conversation with British terms such as "bonnet" for the hood of a car. We wanted, some of us more than others, to have a British friend—we willingly and unconsciously filled in the gaps and discrepancies ourselves to cover for the anomalies of Gus's stories, without thinking about it too much. Kirn spends a lot of time in this book kicking himself for being so easily fooled. He sees now all the things he thinks he should have then, or could have, and is often bitterly rueful. He still has fits of pique and nurses (completely understandable) fantasies of vengeance. Rockefeller, of course, was not a Rockefeller as he claimed, but rather a German national named Christian Gerhartsreiter. Blood Will Out uses Gerhartsreiter's trial for murder in 2012 as a springboard for Kirn's memories of the friendship and his general anguish. I probably would have liked it more if I knew more about either Kirn or the Clark Rockefeller case. There's enough here to make me think about looking into one of the more comprehensive books about Gerhartsreiter's strange career. As for Kirn, I'm not sure how I missed him. He's from Minnesota and has written many novels, including Up in the Air, which became a George Clooney movie I've never seen. I guess you just miss some things. Overall Blood Will Out is a pretty good book, searching and honest about the capacity for self-delusion, with an interesting case at its center.

In case it's not at the library.

"Rules of the Game" (1989)

Read story by Amy Tan online.

It has been a long time since I read Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, which I recall as mostly a single long piece—actually, I remembered it as a memoir. But the real distinction appears to be between novel and collection of stories, in which case I remember it as a novel. But this is in a story anthology and apparently taken as a stand-alone, so OK. It's about a girl who learns at a young age that she has a gift for chess, and how that complicates her relationship with her mother, and her understanding of life as the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants growing up in San Francisco. I'm not sure how I would take "Rules of the Game" without knowing about The Joy Luck Club, but it felt to me like a fragment from something larger. The bigger point is the girl's relationship with her mother, which is touched on here but more peripherally. The story is told first-person by the daughter as a grown woman, and it's particularly good on the reveries of going deeply into a game. When a person has a knack for something, often the most important things occurring in the head, or the brain, don't translate well verbally. There's a learning process happening, but it's very hard to describe, and almost has to be approached indirectly. Here that is evoked wonderfully in the names of chess strategies she learns from an older Chinese man: the Double Attack From East and West Shores ... Throwing Stones on the Drowning Man ... the Sudden Meeting of the Clan ... the Surprise From the Sleeping General, and more. Tan's language is always clear and propulsive, a pleasure to read. But I recall the relationship with the narrator's mother as infinitely more developed than what's here, and even in stunted form it's by far the most interesting element in this story. But the story also has many other good points. The way Tan renders the mother's dialect is wonderful, sharp and evocative. The narrator's Americanized voice makes a good contrast. There's nothing so new or innovative about the story it tells of the rifts between generations in a family of immigrants. But it's done so well I want more—not least, because I know there is more. My recommendation is that you just go read The Joy Luck Club.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

The Shape of Water (2017)

There's a wash of nostalgia in The Shape of Water that's applied so liberally by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro that it's almost too much—but I think it's also a lot of what won me over. I went into it hoping for a monster movie that would make me cry, and that's more or less what I got. I knew I loved Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, which is somehow almost 10 years old now. Not surprisingly, she is great here too. Del Toro conceived the role of Elisa Esposito with her in mind. Elisa is mute but not deaf, an orphan who was found by a river. She works as a janitor. Hawkins studied film players such as Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Audrey Hepburn for the part, and she brings a tremendous amount of poise and power to the role and the movie. On certain obvious levels, The Shape of Water is pure movie entertainment hokum, maybe even a little more than I bargained for—closer to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast than Universal's Creature From the Black Lagoon, and even closer to the musical Wizard of Oz, with its emotional whiplash, yearning desires for home, and song and dance numbers. The Shape of Water is set at the height of the Cold War—approximately 1960, as both Mr. Ed and Dobie Gillis make cameo appearances on various TV consoles in various living rooms. That period detail felt a little rancid to me, with the flashy Cadillacs, beehive hairdos, comfy diners, retro bigotry and such. But del Toro mostly buries it in shadows, with a lot of the movie taking place in a harsh underground facility or shabby apartments. It looks more like Being John Malkovich than Mad Men.

And the most affecting hits of nostalgia lean all the way back to the '30s and '40s. Elisa plays Benny Goodman records for the monster, for example. The monster is an amphibious human-sized creature captured by the American military somewhere in South America (presumably near Black Lagoon, wink wink)—the only name we hear for him is "the asset." The American military being what it is in Hollywood movies, they don't know what they have so they proceed to torture it to see what that gets them. Russians are also nosing around—part of the Cold War theme, with the subterfuge eventually turning into useful plot points. Michael Shannon once again plays an extremely bad guy and he's as good at it as ever. But he's very evil. And Elisa is very angelic. Then you remember: it's a fairy tale movie. It has excesses and actually they run in both directions. It's awfully saccharine awfully often—the monster is beautiful, so much so that at one point he causes a distracted driving accident. Much of that is the giant soulful eyes, but some is the tender rubbery lips of Mick Jagger. Otherwise it is scaly, gray, and sopping wet. The love story that develops between the monster and Elisa is gentle and beautiful, if you're in the mood for that kind of thing. If you're not, remember, Michael Shannon is coming for everything you love and that dude is just bad. We see a few of the terrible things he does. So there is often suspense and high tension around every corner. The Shape of Water sets a moderate pace and keeps it up all the way, with a nice batch of players. Besides Hawkins and Shannon, it also has roles for Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Doug Jones wears the fish suit. Among other things The Shape of Water is a useful reminder that fairy tales are not always for children. It even spends some time on racial issues—and not metaphorically related to the monster. It's pretty good.

Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville (2014)

I'm still keeping an open mind about the 33-1/3 series, which has spawned so many tempting and intriguing album / author combinations over the years, though too often they seem to be disappointments. I suspect they are hampered as much by the series premise as anything. It looks like such a fundamentally sound idea—one writer, one album, one short book—but the execution can get hairy. How are you supposed to spend your 30,000 or whatever words—on details of production, cultural context, pure critique, gossip, memoir, social theory? With library research or interviews and original research or both or neither? Gina Arnold's return to rock criticism after a hiatus of a decade or so for family and graduate school has to be one of the better titles in the series, simply going by the fact that it's one of the few I wanted to start (for me so far the hard part) and then one I was happy to read to the finish.

Arnold remembers Liz Phair's seminal debut album, Exile in Guyville, and the early-'90s times out of which it came. She lays out how "Guyville" was an actual hipster neighborhood in Chicago, Wicker Park by formal name, ruled by an indie-rock ethos that was largely gendered, and male. Arnold is best when she's getting into these issues and fiercely defending Liz Phair and the album. She tends to cast a rosy eye on the times, and more generally the people surrounding the commercial emergence and fallout of Nirvana, which she alternates with something like rage about the manipulation of indie-rock by the music industry, single-mindedly focused as always on moving units. She more than owns any role she had in an empty commercial process and her sense of shame. In many ways this book feels like an attempt to make amends—to us, and to herself.

When Your Heartstrings Break (1999)

Standing tall in the shadows of Neutral Milk Hotel and Guided by Voices, Beulah was built from the inside out, starting with the two principals, Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan, who by reputation never liked each other much, once again suggesting that shared musical taste does not always make for good friends. Guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Kurosky met guitarist, singer, and trumpeter Swan when they worked together in a San Francisco office. Temps, I presume. Keyboardists, bass players, and drummers came and went. The band's association with the Elephant 6 collective came and went. Some good reviews, a little bit of fame, and road life came and went. Four albums and some singles—they never charted. They fought a lot. It didn't really work out. But I love this second album and like a lot of the rest. There is something pop-timeless and pop-ancient about When Your Heartstrings Break: it could almost be an album by icons such as the Beatles, Big Star, Squeeze, or the dBs, or certainly the aforementioned lo-fi paragons. Though Kurosky has all the songwriting credit, Swan is listed with Steve LaFollette as producer, which in some ways feels like the same kind of ruse the Coen brothers have been running for years, trading off directing, writing, and producing honors. Beulah has the feel of another unusual collaboration, like the aforementioned pop paragons, which is borne out by at least one anecdote at Wikipedia, where Kurosky is seen mailing demos from Japan (for a different album) to each of the band members and asking for their individual input, apparently collating it all later. That's not what happened with this album, but even so each song here feels like an individualized insulated little suite, embracing in a way Phil Spector's old idea about the tiny kingdoms of pop, tarted up ingeniously with inspired bridges, sudden attacks of breathless horns and strings, canny use of their trumpet, guitars, keyboards, and whatnot, plus all kinds of shifts in tonal texture and of course those lonesome boy vocals and harmonies, which ache. True to the indie ethos, they play it ironic and distanced, and to tell you the truth I'm not even sure what most of these songs are about. But there is such a beautiful sweet sadness in these oblique articulations. Later we found out Kurosky was diagnosed bipolar and everything made more sense—certainly the strife and maybe some of the music's oddness. But When Your Heartstrings Break is way more than that. It's made of many parts we already know and it's almost 20 years old. But it's still new.

Body Double (1984)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Robert J. Avrech, Brian De Palma
Photography: Stephen H. Burum
Music: Pino Donaggio
Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, Bill Pankow
Cast: Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton, Melanie Griffith, Guy Boyd, Dennis Franz

Body Double has so many of the trademark preoccupations of director and cowriter Brian De Palma—liquid camera movement, swooning music, Playboy-style erotics, the ecosystem of cheesy low-budget moviemaking, and more than anything a fixation on Alfred Hitchcock movies—that it almost seems like it could be reverse-engineered out of them. In many ways it was, by De Palma himself. Yet, as a certain type of "watch what happens" picture, it stays interesting even when it's not making any sense, which is most of the time. Does that mean making sense is overrated? As a partisan of coherent narrative, I don't think so. I saw Body Double when it was new, though not since, and coming back was impressed all over with those preoccupations. All these years later it's still no problem watching Body Double through, though it still rarely adds up.

It's Los Angeles. A struggling young actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), has just caught his girlfriend having sex with another man in their bed. Now he is at loose ends, angry, humiliated, and heartbroken, staying with friends, trying not to drink too much, and looking for work, anything, to take his mind off it. One thing leads to another and soon he finds himself with a nice housesitting gig by way of a friend of a friend, Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry). The place is an amazing artifact of wealth, a saucer-shaped glass structure, like the cap of the Seattle Space Needle, propped against the side of a hill high above Los Angeles, with a view of everything. That includes a beautiful woman, seen through a spyglass telescope, who performs a striptease masturbation scene every night, "like clockwork," according to Sam, who makes sure to point that out to Jake before leaving.

"Helping" (1987)

Read story by Robert Stone online.

Robert Stone's story is an absurdist and vaguely comical tale of an alcoholic relapse. It's gnawing at something deeper, but I'm not sure I know what that is any better than the two central characters, Chas Elliott and his wife Grace. He is a social worker giving in to burnout. She is a Child Protective Services lawyer. She wants to help but needs the layer of legal formalities to shield her from raw human drama. Chas is also a Vietnam veteran. At this point, I'm tired of Vietnam veterans and recovering alcoholic stories. I appreciate that the focus here is on the relapse, as that is one of the hardest and most mysterious sides of addiction and recovery. But I don't think it has much more to offer than the usual self-dramatizations. There are some exchanges between Chas and Grace that are bitter and caustic, but not particularly believable. They seem too disconnected from their evident rage, too poised and cool and articulate. The drama of alcoholism was popular and widely embraced in the '80s. We saw another example in a story earlier in this collection, Richard Bausch's "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona," which I didn't find much more convincing than this. Partly it's the literary aspects, so deliberately thought through, such as the many meanings and tones of the one-word title in the Stone story (or the parallel ambiguities of using "in" instead of "to" in the Bausch). Am I saying they're too good to be good? Well, yes, in a way. The drama in "Helping" is strange and hard to understand from the outside looking in, which is where Stone puts us. The attitudes of Chas—you can't understand if you're not a Vietnam veteran and/or recovering alcoholic—are difficult to separate from Stone's, if indeed they are different at all. They probably are. The two novels by Stone that I know—Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise—are very good as I recall. And "Helping" is obviously worked over and thought through to an admirable degree. I'm just not sure that the drama of alcoholism (which more and more seems to me related to narcissistic disorders) offers enough to support the long and artful exercise of this story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Gone to New York (2005)

This collection of pieces by Ian Frazier looks a little like one of his collections of humorous pieces. Most come from the New Yorker and most are very short, under five printed pages. But the themes and style are more like his travel books, focused on his adopted home of New York City. He moved there in the '70s to work for the New Yorker and has lived there ever since, making it his base. He has lived in lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and suburban New Jersey. He pokes at New York life in ways no one else ever seems to but that are perfectly characteristic of him. He researches how the Holland Tunnel was built in one of the longer pieces, for example, and piles on with unusual detail. In another piece, a short one, he collects comments left by people signing the registration book at a Brooklyn art museum. One continuing theme is funny in a droll New York kind of way, and that is his obsession with cleaning out plastic bags that collect in the highest branches of trees. He and a friend even design and patent a device, the "bag snagger," which they take on day trips around the city to clean. He says it replaced golf for them. Jamaica Kincaid writes an affectionate foreword—I'm not sure why, but it cheers me to find they are friends—and along the way asks perhaps the most salient question about Ian Frazier. "I asked myself, How did he do that? And that thought has never stopped occurring to me; to this day, when I read something new that he has written, I think, How did he do that?" It's true, and in addition he makes whatever it is look easy. One thing I admire and even envy is his prodigious reporting capability, which only means his willingness to sit and talk to people, ask questions, listen to the answers, and then report them out in his light and easy-rolling essays that nonetheless stay with you. And even though I have read his amazing family history more than once (Family), I don't think I ever realized before how proud he is to be from Ohio. He's careful to make sure we understand New York City—which he doesn't even love as much as Russia or the American Great Plains, let alone Ohio—is only his adopted home. It's not his real home. He's just been living there for a while. Maybe that explains why this is his slenderest travel volume. Certainly worth a look.

In case it's not at the library.

"Flight" (1938)

Read story by John Steinbeck online.

John Steinbeck's story involves a lot of elements familiar to his work, including a setting in Monterey, California, and a poor Hispanic family, living and working on a farm, eking out an existence. The father is dead and there are three children. The oldest is Pepe, at 19, who seems friendly and open and is described as lazy. He loves the switchblade knife his mother gave him as a keepsake of his father. In the story, she sends him to town for supplies, but when he returns he is in trouble. A confrontation occurred and he has killed someone. Now he must flee into the mountains. But he is ill-prepared for the flight, as the story now veers into man vs. nature business for most of its bulk, good stuff if not much new. It quickly becomes apparent this is going to be a doomed enterprise. There's little social commentary beyond the basic premise of the family's impoverishment. The story supplies concrete details of the trail, the escape, and what happens, as Pepe begins to lose everything piece by piece: the knife, the horse, his hat, the rifle he brought with him, and finally water. He's not prepared for any of it and his end is a sad one, but Steinbeck doesn't spend much time on that. He was a natural storyteller, able to move his narratives with physical description, and this story is a fine example. It's rarely surprising but always vivid and engaging, the kind of thing Jack London was also good at, including making its social points in quietly effective ways. Pepe's troubles have little to do with his ethnicity, but it's also obvious his ethnicity never makes anything easier. Early in the story we learn how his father died, and we meet his younger sister and brother, who are 12 and 14, and it's hard to see rosy futures for any of them, but that is never dwelt on. We are simply privy to this one terrible episode in their lives, reminiscent of the scene in a song by Neil Young, "Powderfinger." It's sad and terrible but feels eternal, like a biblical parable. Your heart can't help but go out to the good nature and stupidity of this typical 19-year-old, who believes he is an adult but is not. So it goes. This is a good one.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine