"Fever" (1983)

Story by Raymond Carver not available online.

Raymond Carver puts on a clinic in modern short story fiction writing with this story from his Cathedral collection. "Fever" is less often anthologized than other stories in Cathedral, which also includes the title story, "Where I'm Calling From," "Vitamins," and others. But Carver made it his contribution to the anthology American Short Story Masterpieces, which he edited with Tom Jenks in 1987. That might indicate some feeling he had for it. In many ways it's typical of Carver, focused on a family at the moment it crumbles and full of incidents that are just out of control, like bad dreams. The first-person narrator, Carlyle, is a high school art teacher. He tells how his wife Eileen unexpectedly left him and their two children at the end of the previous school year, in early June. Now it's September, the start of the new school year, and his life is in total disarray. He has spent the summer attempting to come to terms with the loss, which he believes is only temporary. Eileen has left him to live with a former colleague of his. The school year is starting but Carlyle still has not made arrangements for day care of the children. At the last minute, he hires the first person he finds, a "fat girl" named Debbie who is 19. A few days later he comes home to find his children unattended on the front lawn, except by a dangerous-looking dog. Inside the house, Debbie is partying with three teenage boys. So it goes. Carlyle still talks to Eileen but he is beginning to hate her. She is full of nonsensical touchy-feely recovery talk. Eileen sends greetings from Carlyle'a former colleague every time they talk. There's more, with the same extremes of ups and downs, as coping proceeds. It's hard to convey the feeling of reading it—it's so immediate, so vivid. Carver was expert at plumbing these emotional pivot points inside people. No one, not even Debbie, is entirely unsympathetic, and everyone is capable of turning inward and doing the right thing. And the wrong thing. The pathos and confusions of the situation—a divorce, with young children involved—are captured well. There's even a nice and simple revelation that powers the story, as Carlyle shifts from believing his marriage can be saved and isn't over, to accepting that it is. This is a great example of what makes Carver so good.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Keeping Up With the Joneses (2016)

Director Greg Mottola has made a few movies worth tracking down for one reason or another—Paul, Adventureland, Superbad, and all the way back to The Daytrippers 20 years ago, on the indie circuit. His warm and gentle low-key style focuses on character quirks as the natural source of laughs and character motivation. It's most obvious when he also writes the screenplays (Adventureland and The Daytrippers), but it's always there. He did not write Keeping Up With the Joneses, which perhaps explains this movie's very strong desire to be a sexy spy and action movie. As a matter of tone, it keeps intruding until finally it takes over the picture altogether. Tim and Natalie Jones (Jon Hamm and Gal Godot) are the new neighbors in the cul-de-sac on Maple Circle, in an upscale Atlanta suburb. We learn from a chatty realtor in the first scene that the Joneses paid for the house with cash, without ever looking at it in person, so it's obvious they are no ordinary suburban couple. Jeff and Karen Gaffney, however (Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher), put out the old welcome mat for these exotics anyway, and Tim is grateful—because actually he is a spy who wants information about the corporation where Jeff works in HR. Soon enough, they have a bromance going, and Karen is warming to Natalie too. Then the movie starts to spring various surprises, so I'll leave off here on the plot summary. (Comedies aren't normally subject to spoiler rules, are they? At least I'm not sure I can think of one. I have to be forgetting something.) There are a few bright moments, most of them involving Galifianakis. Fisher and Godot have a couple good scenes too. But then familiar action routines start up, with car chases and firefights and such. This movie is not that funny, and I can't imagine it cuts the mustard as an action picture either.

What about this? In my town, the movie choices are basically a couple of multiplexes, plus a decent arthouse. The multiplex I tend to favor is presently undergoing renovations, switching over to a reserved seating system. Has this been going on for a while? You have to pick your seat when you buy your ticket. The seats are double-deluxe, overstuffed padding with wide armrests and a button to tilt back and shove up a leg-rest like a barcalounger. It's kind of like a dentist's chair. I'm not sure I understand the business strategy here, because now there seem to be fewer of these expensive seats in each theater. I suppose that means the prices are going up, but is this something people want? The aisles are wide and my worry is next they're going to try serving food in there or something insane like that. I've been going to the other multiplex a lot lately. Maybe I shouldn't worry so much.

"Verona: A Young Woman Speaks" (1977)

Read story by Harold Brodkey online.

I know of Harold Brodkey vaguely, by reputation, as a literary wunderkind who stalled in the middle of outsize regard, while attempting to complete a mother of all novels. Promised for some 20 years, A Party of Animals was finally published in 1991 as The Runaway Soul. The reviews were bad. In the early throes of that drama came this story, which won awards and ended up anthologized by Raymond Carver. It's very short, telling the first-person story in memory of an adolescent girl on a Christmas vacation train trip with her family across Europe, from Rome to Salzburg. Brodkey is evidently a painstaking writer because every word feels chiseled from dense stone. It's not easy reading somehow. The language feels tortured and compressed, and the events told don't add up to much. It's a pair of golden Christmas memories that take place in Verona, Italy, one with each of her parents, and then some brief consideration of which was best. It's hard to connect with the narrator—she claims they are poor, or middle class, saying the vacation is a one-time splurge. But they look overprivileged and even worse, if it's pretension. The tone of the narrator is never far from haughty, though it's measured enough to betray insecurities inside of that. But it's not enough. She's not a very interesting person, or we are told too little of her. The incidents have a charming sentimental glow about them. But the tone is always disagreeable somehow, and there's some sense sentimentality is mocked a little. As it should be, no doubt. Brodkey polishes and burnishes his language to a luster, controlling like a poet even the rhythms of the syllables, but the result is that the sense of meaning or connection is obscured. It's all a little pyrotechnical and showoffy in a way, so concerned about getting the tiniest details just so that it forgets about the main void at its heart. Or perhaps it's an intentional void, which I don't think would actually make it any better. I don't know Brodkey's more celebrated short story collection from 1958, First Love and Other Sorrows, which conceivably could help me understand this free-floating fragment better. But I'm not that tempted to investigate further. He reminds me somehow of William Gass, another American writer of great reputation, specializing in the short story, who tends to leave me cold because the writing feels belabored. Maybe they were even the best of friends.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

The Prisoner of Sex (1971)

It's fair to say this is one place where Norman Mailer really steps in it. The wide-scale rejection has been reasonably complete: the book is out of print, and used copies command low prices. At this writing it can be had for 25 cents plus postage. As someone sympathetic to Mailer—not so much for all his ideas as for his commitment to writing, and his abilities—I want to plead circumstances. Written in 1970, the year after he separated from his fourth wife, "women's liberation" was just then surging into popular consciousness, the place where Mailer made his living. The unfortunate result is this book, which adopts an unrelenting mocking tone. He seethes with a rage out of all proportion, giant and petty all at once. Here, for one thing, is where he obviously makes a point of using the word "lady" rather than "woman." And here is where some of his strangest ideas come to the fore, such as arguing masturbation as a kind of mortal sin against the soul. He veers dangerously close to Todd Akin territory, who, remember, told us in 2012, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down"—"that whole thing" meaning pregnancy. Mailer dresses it up in his high-flown language, but take away the metaphorical conceits (which I tend to allow him for the poetry) and it's pretty much where you're at when he's on the sweet mystery of life. He spends most of this short book (at least it's short) in a one-sided boxing match with Kate Millet and her book Sexual Politics, though other key figures of the time are also arraigned at the dock, including Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Germaine Greer. He may or may not expose some shabby work on Millet's part here and there, and he makes a spirited defense of Henry Miller, a writer I've never connected with. He may be even more interesting here on D.H. Lawrence. But they are only excursions he goes on, as Mailer mainly struggles with women and their place. Mostly he seems to be working out his own unpleasant psychological issues, ambivalent feelings about his mother and such, without appearing to have a shred of self-awareness. Thus, it's often just embarrassing, with admixtures of aggravation. Mailer is of my father's generation, though he's not much like my Dad. I do see some commonalities: the sense of losing their marriages a little from the changes to fundamentals they had absorbed entirely, mostly about (not surprisingly) race, gender, and sexuality. So here is Mailer trying to let it all hang out, just let it rip as usual, but he keeps tripping over increasingly ludicrous assumptions, such as that the purpose of women is to bear children—the single purpose, if it has to be reduced to that. He's opposed to contraception too, on ridiculous poetical grounds, similar to his problem with masturbation: the tragedy of all those wriggling wasted sperm cells that could be impregnating eggs. Mailer and this book are a real ugly mess, in short, but interesting in their way, like the mythical geek at the traveling carnival. File this under I read it so you don't have to.

In case it's not at the library.

"Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta" (1990)

Read story by Kate Braverman online.

Kate Braverman's story is so strange and powerful, yet so full of such familiar elements, that already it feels like some classic of the post-Carver story era. The unnamed woman at the center of it is 38 years old, a creative writing teacher, and a recovering cocaine addict. One day, on her way to an AA meeting, a man approaches her and makes blunt overtures. "You're bad," he says. "You're one of those bad girls from Beverly Hills. I've had my eye on you." His name is Lenny, he says he is a Vietnam veteran, he wants to go out with her, and it turns out he has been following her for two weeks. He knows all kinds of things about her life. To us as readers, he is instantly, unnervingly creepy. But the narrator appears susceptible to him, which creates a wonderful gnawing tension. Every time she gives him another inch we want to scream. She gets rid of him but he always shows up again, within days or weeks. He's got a slick line of talk, says he can show her the "other side" of life. He says he works with Colombians as a drug runner, flying in product twice a month. She gets rid of him but he always shows up again. Gradually, Lenny is getting her to go along with him somehow, and everything he does for her is for the worse. He starts her up smoking cigarettes again. He is working on her to use cocaine again. He seems to have no compunctions, though he's also smart enough to hang back and let her have her way when she asserts herself. Then he just goes to work on her again. It's unpleasant and sickening to watch her give in to him, yet we're helpless to do anything but keep looking. Lenny is such an unlikely monster, or I am so naïve, that I think the story amounts to an allegory, with Lenny as the embodiment of addiction, something like that. It's perhaps trite, taken that way, yet Lenny and the woman's response to him are so compelling it doesn't really occur to us until later. He has an extraordinary power that reaches out and affects us too. He may be unbelievable, but he is believable in the moment, and that's enough. The woman is likable on the merits: single, nearing 40, teaching creative writing, leading an independent life, taking care of herself. But she is also, as events show, a real addict battling real addictions, which are battles not always won. In the end she's buying cigarettes by the carton and drinking again. There's no sign this one is anything but a loss, and somehow it's heartbreaking.

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

"1/3, 1/3, 1/3" (1971)

Read story by Richard Brautigan online.

Richard Brautigan was once an infatuation for me, around the time this story appeared in a 1971 collection, or shortly after. I think the appeal was his kind of gentle tone of hippie insouciance, which served his verbal absurdities reasonably well. It hasn't aged that well though, since even before his suicide in 1984. This very short story helps me remember the reasons for both liking him and abandoning him. The first-person narrator describes an invitation he has received to collaborate on a literary work. He will do the typing, the young woman inviting him on board will do the editing, and a middle-aged man living in a trailer nearby will write it. The proceeds will be split equally—"1/3, 1/3, 1/3," per title. The narrator is invited because he has a typewriter. Toward the end of the story a sample of the work is reproduced, and it is hardly even literate. Which is not surprising, given these characters. What surprises me is finding it in an anthology edited by Raymond Carver for an ambitious anthology in the '80s (American Short Story Masterpieces), intended as a response or addendum to another ambitious anthology, edited by Robert Penn Warren and released in 1954 (Short Story Masterpieces), which set out to chronicle the short story in the first half of the century. I do believe I detect some bias toward West Coast writers in the Carver collection, but I'm mostly OK with it. I'm even OK seeing Brautigan included, although I think his work does best isolated to its own whimsical contexts. Excerpts as poems, stories, and/or passages often suffer alone and in the open. The characters here read to me first as willful ignoramuses, and then finally as just ignoramuses. I have no idea what they think they are doing, even less what Brautigan intended by it. An incident reminiscent of the scenario actually happened to me once. An apartment building manager where I lived knew I was a writer and approached me one day, wanting to know if I was interested in reading a novel he had been working on, inspired by reading Stephen King's The Stand. A couple of weeks later he knocked on my door and presented me with two pages of single-spaced typewritten copy. It was a scene from the rooftop of our building, to which only he had access, overlooking downtown Seattle, ravaged by a plague. The narrator was a little disturbingly gleeful about the scene, and there was lots of random violence, as much as you could get into 900 words. I told him it was a good start and he should keep at it. It looked like a big story. He told me it was going to be even bigger than The Stand. It was not as illiterate as the manuscript in Brautigan's story, but close. If enough people have stories like mine, then "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" is really going to resonate.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"The Darling" (1990)

Story by Scott Bradfield not available online.

Scott Bradfield's story is little more than 25 years old but already it feels a little dated, working from the fascination with serial killers then entering its glamour phase in popular culture. The operative comparison is probably Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho novel, which came the year after. It's likely enough neither writer was particularly aware of the other. That was the time when serial killer trading cards came along, recall. It was just in the air. On a more conscious level, Bradfield is looking to Chekhov, who also wrote a story called "The Darling," which is also about a woman whose husbands keep dying on her. In the Bradfield story, however, it's because she keeps killing them. Bradfield is often attempting to have things both ways. It's a comedy more than anything, indulging ridiculous plot developments, yet the star of the show, Dolores Starr by name, is also a victim of abuse and incest, and in fact her father is her first victim. All right, maybe, but when Dolores meets and falls in love with another serial killer (they pull guns on one another simultaneously and it's true love, at least for awhile) you know you're in absurdist territory. And the problem with absurdist territory is that it means anything can happen, and thus nothing has significance. It's all just too easy. Bradfield's language is urbane and vaguely mocking. It's fun to read because he flatters you that you're in on the joke. But it's not a very good joke. As literary exercise it's impressive enough. I didn't know the Chekhov reference, and that story might have the effect of deepening this one, adding resonance. Nabokov would appear to be another obvious source. In the first paragraph, the third-person narrator plays with Dolores's name the way Humbert Humbert plays with Lolita's in that novel, and Lolita's name is also Dolores. So we have a smart and witty writer having some fun, and in fact, Bradfield is among the first to get to this kind of thing. So props to him. He may even deserve more credit than I can say. At this juncture, however, what he deserves credit for is something we're all a little tired of (and have been since approximately Oliver Stone's 1994 movie Natural Born Killers). The story is hampered by other small problems—it's distracting that the rare serial killer who is a woman is the main character, making it even harder to believe, and then there's the enduring problem of one gender writing from the other's point of view. It doesn't tend to go well. Dolores gets away with everything until it is convenient to the story for her to be captured, imprisoned, and become a celebrity. Points for prescience in popular culture trends. Docked for not including zombies.

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

"The Amish Farmer" (1980)

Story by Vance Bourjaily not available online.

Vance Bourjaily's "The Amish Farmer" skirts close to formal self-consciousness as stunt, recounting a college class in creative writing in which the first-person narrator—"Vance" he is identified at one point—presents a lesson on point of view in fiction. He does so by telling the class a story of a graduate student he knew, who took an appointment in the Midwest and had a hard time getting his beautiful wife to follow. When she finally does, reluctantly, her husband rents an isolated house for them in Amish country. Bourjaily has a lot of fundamentals about storytelling down, which are on display here. He shuttles easily between the classroom and the scenes with the graduate student and his wife in their isolated winter. He dwells almost lasciviously on his description of the wife, which is effective enough but reads as through written with a boner. That serves to undermine the spell of his language and narrative momentum, reminding us we are in a college classroom discussing the creation of fiction. This hackneyed setting is the greatest weakness of this story, though necessary to the points he wants to make about fiction, reality, and perception. Particularly when he addresses the specific point of view problems, after he's told the story, it gets pretty interesting. This is no trite Rashomon exercise. The actual events, though vague, are not much in dispute. Rather, Vance suggests to his class, it's the many varieties of story, such as farce, melodrama, or tragedy, each with their built-in expectations and understanding, that shades the way we understand his story. In turn, that depends on whose view it is. The story also has another, seemingly disconnected interest in specifically one of the students in the class. I didn't get that. Bourjaily, even judging by this story (which is all I know by him, though I have been toting around a paperback of The Violated for decades), was a pretty good writer, at home with and adept at slinging seductive language that makes him enjoyable to read. Still, there is a certain masculinist set of preoccupations (talking about point of view) that is often distracting, dated, and/or painful. That must be overcome for this thought experiment on fictional technique to work. After that, there's the problem of the clichéd setting. The story can be forgiven for failing to overcome these liabilities. It's worth looking at, thinking about, maybe even teaching. But there would have to be caveats.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"Talk of Heroes" (1985)

Story by Carol Bly not available online.

Carol Bly's short story does a pretty neat trick of tying together two kinds of 20th-century American fiction: the frame features a Cheever / Carver postwar focus on suburban life, while the long illustrative anecdote at its center is something Papa Hemingway himself might have called "very fine." Maybe that's one reason it ended up in two of the three collections I'm covering. In the frame story, Emily Anderson, a woman in her 50s or 60s, is responsible for introducing the speaker at that month's meeting of the Minnesota chapter of a national organization of Norwegian-American immigrants, Tusend Hjem, for which she volunteers. She is widowed or divorced, and at the time of the story her 24-year-old daughter is staying with her at her home in suburban St. Paul with a view of White Bear Lake. Her daughter is a therapist and her marriage appears to be foundering. As it happens, Emily knows the speaker at that night's Tusend Hjem meeting, which is one reason she was asked to introduce him. She's also one of the key volunteers in the organization. The speaker is named Willi Varig. He was a Norwegian war hero in World War II. Emily knew him when she lived in Oslo in the '50s. Varig, it turns out, is a lush—which is as Emily remembers him—and he is blind drunk that night. He can barely make coherent remarks ahead of a documentary to be shown about Norwegian war heroes on a 16-mm projector. But the projector malfunctions. And Varig has passed out. So it's up to Emily to go to the lectern and tell his story, which she does in very long paragraphs that occupy about a third of this story. It's a harrowing tale of enduring torture at the hands of Nazis, holding out as long as he had to in order to protect Norwegian resistance fighters fleeing the German-occupied country. It's more delicate about the torture than what we might expect these days, but we're given enough details to get the idea, and Varig's pitiful display of drunkenness completes the picture. There might be an argument about Bly's ambitions, but the Hemingway stoicism is actually more general to the whole story, and not just the war story, because it's more a feature of Emily's, who has more than just fond and indulgent regard for Varig. By the way she tells her story it's apparent how much respect she has for him. The multiple levels on which the title may be taken are thus affirmed, with Emily not just speaking about a hero, but also simply speaking. She is a hero too.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

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

Queen of Katwe (2016)

I like to feel good as much as the next person, which is why a feel-good sports movie often appeals. (You know, "Go Cubs.") Equal parts Bad News Bears and NPR news feature story—and so as not to miss a bet, "based on true events"—Queen of Katwe is a lively underdog drama, with the story of Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), a chess prodigy from the slums of Katwe, Uganda. David Oyelowo (MLK Jr. in Selma) is Robert Katende, the inspirational community leader who coaches kids in soccer and chess. This one paints in easily by numbers—that's right, it's Disney. Phiona has a tough life. Her father is dead, her mother (Lupita Nyong'o in a nice performance) is barely making it at a subsistence level. An older sister is growing up too fast, and there are more mouths to feed besides. But Phiona takes to chess right away, and Katende, who loves the game and is a student of it himself, soon recognizes her talent. As sports movies go, chess is one of the harder competitions to dramatize, much like the problems with computer hacking movies, because it's just people sitting around quietly concentrating. I recall from Searching for Bobby Fischer, for example, the recurring fascination with the clocks they use in the game, with players tapping them to signal the end of their moves. There's a lot of those clocks and that tapping here too. I understand the game enough to follow some of the board play they show, which I appreciated for the veracity, though it was nearly as often over my head. But that doesn't matter much. Once the terms of the sports drama are set, it follows familiar rhythms and goes familiar places: the discovery of the remarkable talent, the first surprising achievement against all odds, the overconfidence which leads to a demoralizing defeat, the overcoming of that in turn, etc. As a Disney movie, Queen of Katwe is also full of colorful African detail, such as music you'd expect to find on a Putamayo collection, bright and interesting clothing, busy markets, joyful carrying on, and so forth. I didn't actually feel like I learned much about Uganda or Ugandan culture, beyond the terms of the poverty, but that's sufficient to the cause of the movie. This is an underdog tale, and while it has its share of miscues and overdoing it, it mostly stays out of its own way and lets the drama build out of the games and rounds of tournaments. It's pretty good on the poverty—it's Disney, so inevitably somewhat sugarcoated, but it feels real enough. They plainly have a hard life and few ways out. Chess may be the unlikeliest way out of all, but hey, based on true events, you can't make this stuff up, and what are you gonna do? Keep this in your back pocket for when you're in a Hoosiers or Breaking Away mood.