Although I have spent a long career trying to teach students
how to appreciate “great” short stories, I accept the fact that a short story
does not have to be “great” to be enjoyable.
For example, I don’t think Jess Walter, who has just published his first
collection of short stories We Live in Water, writes “great” short
stories, but I admit they are well written and pass the time pleasantly enough.
I suspect that this collection is an attempt by Walter’s
publisher Harper Perennial to “cash in” on the success of his novel, Beautiful
Ruins, which came out early last summer just in time for taking to the
beach. Nothing wrong with that, of
course. As Samuel Johnson is reputed to
have said once, “Only a fool writes for anything but money.” After reading the stories in We Live in
Water, I checked out the reviews of Beautiful Ruins and found the
following:
“great fun to read”
“good
old-/fashioned, escapist story..with a satirical edge.”
“Literary summer novel don’t get much better than this.”
“can be read as a clever escapist romance or as a bracing
dose of social commentary
“entertaining
tale”
“a page turner of a plot”
“an absolute gem
of a beach read”
“a compelling,
fun read”
Allegra Goodman in the Washington Post caught the
flavor quite well: “Walter constructs a lemon meringue pie of a novel, crisp
and funny on top, soft and gooey in the middle….The quick reader will enjoy a
plot that's well constructed and also lively.”
However, a few reviewers thought that Beautiful Ruins was
more than just a good beach read: The
reviewer in The Boston Globe says Beautiful Ruins has “the generous soul of a literary classic. .
. . Walter has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors.” And the reviewer in The Philadelphia Inquirer
pronounced, “This writer is a genius of the modern American moment.”
Whew! Not quite sure what the modern American “moment” is, but sure as hell
sounds impressive. Whether a novel is declared “popular” or “literary” by
reviewers depends, of course, on how the reviewer defines “literary.”
It strikes me that this same definitional divide applies to We
Live in Water also. The twelve stories and one esayistic list of 50
factoids and autobiographical anecdotes entitled “Statistical Abstract for My
Hometown, Spokane, Washington” in We Live in Water, have been
accumulating for the past seven years after having first appeared in Playboy,
Harper’s, McSweeney’s and several lesser known places. Together,
they constitute a thin paperback volume of pleasant narrative diversions, but
not the work of a writer in the first “rank of American authors,” it seems to
me, and sure as hell not by a “genius of the modern American moment,” whatever
that is.
My introduction to Jess Walter’s work is the story “Anything
Helps” in the 2012 Best American Short Story volume, which I have
commented on earlier. I was not
impressed with it then, thinking it was basically a well-made story rigged to
engage my sympathies for a homeless alcoholic trying to connect with his son in
foster care by buying him a Harry Potter novel. The best phrase to describe the story’s reader appeal I found in
an Esquire review of We Live in Water--“gritty, and bighearted.”
A calculated combination, for the story, it seemed to me, confirmed by my
reading of the other stories in the book.
A literary story, which is the kind we usually expect to find
in Best American Short Stories, can be defined as such if
it is well written and charts the downward spiral of what Allison Glock in her New
York Times review of We Live in Water calls social
“disappointments”—guys who have let folks down, made bad choices, and brought
misfortune on themselves—which is what Jess Walter does in many of the stories
in this light-weight volume.
“The New Frontier” is about a guy who elicits the help of an
old “buddy” to rescue his stepsister from prostitution in Las Vegas, but things
are not as they seem, and the story ends with a predictable
complication/resolution. The title
story is a “find the father” story that shifts back and forth between 1958 when
a guy disappears after being caught stealing from the wrong man, and 1992, when
his son sets out to find out what happened to him. In “The Wolf and the Wild,”
a recently paroled man tries to pay his dues by working with children in a
community service program, but runs into child molestation fears. Not gritty, but certainly bighearted. These
four are the so-called “serious” stories, which give the collection its
“literary” cache.
However, many of the stories are just fun. For example, although “Wheelbarrow Kings”
features two meth addict buddies trying to lug a huge old projection-style
television set to a pawn shop to get money for dope, it’s all a joke, for we
know, if the two addicts do not, that no one is going to buy that old dinosaur
of a TV; the pleasure in the story is the comic efforts to get the damned thing
down the streets in a stolen wheelbarrow.
And “Helpless Little Things” may be about a scammer
drug-dealer exploiting homeless young people to make a bad buck, but it is
really a “biter bite” story about how the scammer gets scammed. “Virgo” is another joke story about a
newspaper copy editor who tries to get even with his ex-girlfriend by rigging
her daily horoscope. “Thief” is a trick-ending story about a guy who goes to
elaborate lengths to catch one of his children who has been staling coins from
the family vacation jar. There are also three little bitty “flash” stories
about a guy named Tommy with his young son and his dying stepfather entitled
“Can a Corn,” “Please,” and “The Brakes.” And by all means, don’t miss “Don’t
Eat Cat,” supposedly a satiric take on the current pop culture interest in
zombies, but which is really a pop culture story about zombies.
Jess Walter is a professional writer, a guy who makes much of
his living writing—first as a journalist and now as a fiction writer, who has
cranked out a political mystery novel, a 9/11 suspense novel, a social satire,
and a movie romance epic, and this collection of popular, entertaining, but
certainly not literary, short stories.
If Jess Walter signifies the “modern American moment,” then the moment
is about fiction that pleasantly passes the time but does not significantly
stimulate the grey matter. Just the kind of disposable stories your Kindle was made for. Be careful about getting sand in the motherboard.
