Puzzle the Prof: Stephen Dobyns' "A Happy Vacancy"

Richard Pangburn has suggested a story for me to consider for “Puzzle the Prof” this year—Stephen Dobyns’ “A Happy Vacancy,” from his collection Eating Naked (2000).

Richard says the story “starts out clever and ironic but before the end of the story it critiques cleverness and irony and becomes profound and deep. Perhaps too deep.”

As it happens, I read Eating Naked several years ago and do remember with pleasure the opening story “A Happy Vacancy,” although I like the very funny title story about the guy who hits a deer and changes his life even more.  Thanks, Richard, for sending me back to “A Happy Vacancy,” which I have enjoyed once again. I am intrigued by your suggestion that the story starts out clever and ironic but ends up critiquing cleverness and irony to become something profound and deep—perhaps too deep.  By “too deep,” do you mean that Dobyns is too explicit about the profundity of the concept he illustrates here or that the concept is heavier than the story that carries it?

It seems appropriate to me to begin a consideration of “A Happy Vacancy” at the end of the story, since everything before the end seems to lead inevitability to it, where the concept that governs the story is stated rather explicitly in a few dialogues  The first three quarters of the story exists for three purposes, it seems to me—to make us laugh, along with everyone else but the dead poet’s wife; to illustrate a philosophic view of life, death, and the comic; and to get the wife to laugh with the rest of us.

Harriet, the wife of the poet who has died by being squashed by a falling pig, has, eight weeks after his death, decided to leave Cambridge, for the laughter that the manner of her husband’s death has stimulated all around her has made her think that her former life has been shallow, that her and her husband’s seriousness existed to keep people at a distance, served as a strangler of spontaneity and impulse, and rigidified her life.  She now thinks that the absurdity of her husband’s death may have opened a new life and a new way of living to her; she just needs to articulate the view to justify this new way of living.

She moves to Ann Arbor and gets a job at a hospice, for since her husband’s death had made death a joke to her, she now needs to make death “big” again.  She tells a cancer patient that death is a process that begins with birth and accompanies us all through life.  This is, of course, the notion that Freud proposes in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, i.e., that “the goal of all life is death” (1920). Old people in the hospice tell her stories, e.g. one old woman says she was a freshman at Clark University when Freud presented his lectures on the Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. 

Harriet realizes that these stories made time seem causal and that she is attempting to “repair her sense of causality,” since her husband’s death seemed to lie outside of causality.  She thinks that all those people who laughed at the manner of his death should have been terrified, for it indicated the awful truth about the cosmos—“that if it had a divine direction, then its prime mover is whimsy.”  This very well may echo Gloucester’s speech in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport.” Or it may just illustrate the common shrug, “shit happens.”

Harriet meets a doctor who comes to the hospice and tells him that she thinks people try to make their lives too serious and that if you stare long enough at the most serious things in life, maybe you can come out on the side of laughter. When he asks if she thinks that seriousness is connected to fear, she says that we want other people to think us serious, which “suggests a fear of not being sufficiently respected” but she wonders what seriousness gets us, for “It neither delays our death nor makes it easier to bear.”

When the doctor asks Harriet what she thinks is the opposite of seriousness, she says, “love, because love accepts all possibilities, whereas seriousness only accepts what it sees as correct.”  She says she is not against seriousness, but that she is against the earnestness of seriousness, that she wants to go beyond it, that she wants seriousness to be an element in her life, but not its reason for being; seriousness can be no more than self protection, but life can come along and brush it aside, by, for example dropping a pig on your head.

The story ends with a conversation between Harriet and a ninety-five year old man named Franklin.  When she asks him what is the funniest thing he can think of, he says it is the story of the man who was crossing the street in Boston and a pig fell out of a helicopter and crushed him.  Franklin says he has to die in the bed he lies in and wonders why he couldn’t have been killed by a pig falling out of the sky, for then he would, like the poet, be famous forever.

Harriet begins to laugh, and it is the laugh of someone whose seriousness has been overthrown, a laugh that erases every other concern.  Dobyns ends the story this way: “It is the sound of the world disappearing, as all the content is sucked from our heads, to be replaced—briefly, oh too briefly—by a happy vacancy.  And doesn’t this sustain us? Doesn’t it provide the strength to let us bear up our burden and continue our mortal journey?”

It seems to me that this is a story that does not demand interpretation, since Dobyns has provided the “meaning” of the story at the conclusion of his narrating of the event that illustrates that meaning. 

Although I have taught Dobyns’ story “Eating Naked,” I have never discussed “A Happy Vacancy” with students.  If I were discussing this story in a class, I would probably focus on the notion of a “concept” story—a story which begins with a “what if” notion—e.g. what if a pig fell out of the sky and killed a man.  The problem for the writer, and thus the reader, would be what to make of such an event. 

This story may have been motivated by the story of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus being killed by a tortoise dropped on his head by an eagle.  Or it may have begun with Dobyns considering death as the inevitable end of all human life.  Or it may have begun with the notion of undermining seriousness.  I don’t know.  But, surely, if anything needs to be made tolerable by laughter, it is death—that universal human leveler.  It makes no difference if you take it seriously or you meet it with a laugh; it makes no difference if you meet it with dignity or with a hoot, it comes to us all.  It makes no difference whether you go gentle into that good night or whether you rage against the dying of the light, you go nonetheless.  It seems somehow appropriate that the greatest mystery of human experience might well be met with one of the most significant human defenses against all that assails us—laughter.

I like this story. Although death itself is not funny, the idea of someone who takes himself so seriously being pulverized by a falling pig is irresistibly funny. If you gotta go, and yeah, everyone does, then going in such a way that generates laughter rather than tears may not be so bad. I don’t know how I will die, but I sure as hell don’t want anyone crying after it happens.

My sister has a lung disease that the doctors say is terminal.  About a year ago, she was admitted to a hospice.  I flew back to Kentucky to visit with her, thinking that it might be my last opportunity.  But now a year later, she is still alive, albeit tethered to an oxygen tank.  The hospice kicked her out because she refused to die.  She and I joked about it when I saw her last—that she got kicked out a hospice because she would not die fast enough for them.  Together we enjoyed the “happy vacancy,” even for a brief moment, of not taking ourselves seriously, of facing the inevitable without sentimentality, with a hearty laugh. 

Thanks, Richard, for sending me back to Dobyns’ story. It made me think; it made me laugh.

Puzzle the Prof: The Ending of Ron Rash's "Cherokee"

Thanks again to Keith Hood, who has submitted another “Puzzle the Prof” challenge. Keith says he would like to hear from anyone who's read Ron Rash's collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay.  He wants some other opinions about what happens at the end of the story "Cherokee,” saying he senses some irony at work in the phrase about the couple’s knowledge that their luck “couldn’t last,” but is not sure what it is. Keith says he would understand the ending better if the sentence read "their luck [wouldn't] last" but the "couldn't last" leaves him scratching his head.

Thanks much to Richard Pangburn, who has some suggestions about “Cherokee.” He says the story is about a couple who exemplify the “working poor,” who have been persuaded to buy a truck they cannot afford and now are taken in by the lure of the casino that “operates as a tax on the poor.” Richard says drink is a metaphor in the story as the wife goes beyond her limit and gets drunk with the power of their winnings. He notes that the story “ends ok, as they both now realize that this has been simply luck and that any thought that they have exerted control of their luck through a rabbit's foot or personal exceptionalism is merely superstition,” adding that they are better off at the end of the story, more mature, and we can hope, more appreciative of love, of the immaterial things that make life worth while.”

In my opinion, the story does not have such serious social/moral/emotional implications as Richard suggests. I’m not sure that Ron Rash is really concerned with the exploitation of the “working poor” in this story, nor do I think the couple have become more mature, have rejected superstition, and have learned something about eternal human values.

Every once in a while, it seems to me, writers, especially writers of short stories, think about the conventions of narrative, kinds of stories, techniques of telling a story, reader expectations, etc, and decide to play a little game with those conventions.

To quickly review some sophomore-level intro to lit: One of the most basic conventions of story—recognized at least as long ago as Heraclitus and Aristotle’s Poetics – is that the two basic causes of what makes things happen to people in the world are fate and character, most evident, of course, in Tragedy.  Oedipus’s pride in thinking he could go against the Gods causes his downfall, but it is fate that put him on the road where he meets his father. 

Luck and fate may be thought of as quite different--luck defined as random events and fate defined as predetermined events. However, they both share the basic characteristic of being out of human control, for regardless of one’s character, luck and fate are just things that happen.  Luck is what, it seems to me, Ron Rash’s story “Cherokee” is about, although it is also ultimately about character.  As in all stories, the reader’s interest lies here in what will happen; and what will happen is dependent either on luck or character.  It seems to me that what Rash is doing in this little story is playing with this basic narrative convention and reader expectation.

The theme of “luck” is announced at the very beginning of the story and is sustained throughout.  The story opens with reference to the young man wearing a rabbit’s foot on his belt and a four-leaf clover dangling from his neck, both of which suggests the human wish to influence luck.  It also opens with the possibility of fairytale magic as the young woman recalls the story of someone rubbing a magic lantern and being granted three wishes, which suggests doing something to make something happen. The young couple only has one wish—perhaps just as fantastic as the genii in the jar—to play the slot machines to transform their savings of $157.00 into a thousand dollars so they can keep the bank from taking away their Ford Ranger pickup.  Lisa, the young woman, whose perspective governs the story, knows that all it would take is a bit of bad luck—getting laid off or an accident—to lose the truck. The two are hoping that a bit of good luck will insure them against possible bad luck.

In terms of character, the young couple have worked hard during the three years of their marriage, with Danny, the young husband, growing out of his boyish drinking and horsing around with his friends to become a responsible man.   Both Lisa and Danny agree that the only way they might get the needed thousand dollars is by luck, for character (as defined by their responsibility and hard work) is not going to be enough.  They do not see that pinning their hopes on luck, especially on slot machines on which the odds are notoriously in the favor of the house, is foolish, unrealistic, and downright unlikely.  Lisa fondles the rabbit’s foot when she thinks maybe they will win, for “It’s not for lack of trying,” although she has doubts when she sees the imposing casino and wonders, “How could anyone hope to win against such a place?” Of course the only way one can “try” to win is to take a chance and gamble.

Torn between hope and doubt, Danny and Lisa play a slot machine, with the number of credits registered on the machine moving up and down as they win and lose.  The two men who are witness to the couple’s playing are, like everyone else in the casino, depending on “luck”—not knowledge, not skill, not experience—just luck, with one of the men asking to rub the rabbit’s foot and playing some money on Danny’s “lucky” streak.  Throughout the story, the references to luck continue, with one man saying, “You got to ride this kind of luck out,” believing that once you get these machines in a mood to give it up you best stay on them, as if one can, by sheer will and effort, influence the machine.

Finally, when Danny and Lisa win enough to accumulate the needed thousand dollars, Rash has basically three alternatives as to how to end the story—either they will lose it all, or they will win more, or they will quit and go home.  Lisa looks at Danny watching the players after he cashes in, but cannot tell if he is thinking, as she is, that they might win enough to fulfill more of their wishes—pay a year’s rent, start a family, etc.  Lisa thinks that since they have had two experiences of good luck—winning the money and being given a free room—a third time might be a charm.

In the last section of the story, when Lisa wakes the next morning, hung over and finds Danny is not in the room, she, and the reader, suspect the worst—that he has taken the money and gone downstairs and lost it all.  Rash quite purposely sets up this expectation in the reader, for given the overwhelming focus on luck in the story and the conflict between character and the couple’s desire for more good luck, the couple seems narratively set up for a final loss. 

However, when Lisa opens her handbag and finds all the money still there, the story ends with this line: “The elevator closes behind her, and she walks toward a man who knows as well as she does that their luck couldn’t last.” The story does not end with the phrase “their luck wouldn’t last” because there is no clear indication that they are going to continue to gamble; Lisa is sober with the needed thousand safely in hand, and Danny did not take it out of her purse when he had the opportunity.  So the end of the story depends on the couple’s decision about which notion of luck to believe—that luck comes in threes or that luck cannot last.  The first is a wish; the second is a sure thing. 

But there is another possibility: It is not surprising that Danny has not taken the money and gambled with it while Lisa sleeps, for in this story, the couple does everything together.  At the end of the story, they have had continued good luck.  But as she walks toward him, they may be preparing to continue to gamble together—a decision that would mean their luck has now ended, for both know their “luck couldn’t last.”

So what will influence their decision when the story ends—their character or their wish for luck?  Will they feel they have fulfilled their goal and go home and make the payments on the truck, or will they create new goals and hope their luck will continue? It is up to the reader to decide.

The most famous example of an open story like this is Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.” Ostensibly "The Lady or the Tiger" is a story about justice, that is, the only kind of justice possible in fiction--poetic justice.  The end of the game played by the semibarbaric king has only two alternatives, and they are quite purposely the conventional alternative endings of comedy or tragedy--marriage or death.  The fact that this particular story "ends" before it ends, giving the reader the freedom to choose a conclusion, is a game on Stockton's part to exploit the reader's need to "close" a story, to see true justice enacted. 

Stockton urges readers to close the story not by choosing what they want to come out of the door, but rather in the way readers always achieve closure--by looking back at the plot, the tone, and the thematic motifs to determine the story's thematic "end."  Since the story makes quite clear that the semibarbaric nature of the princess consists of her being both lady-like and tigerish, what readers are really asked to decide is which aspect of the princess dominates at the end--her lady side or her tiger side.  Because the presentation of what goes on the princess' mind makes quite clear which side that is, the reader is not so free to choose as it first appears.    

The story is most interesting, however, for its focus on the reader's need for closure.  For even though the story leaves little doubt that the tiger pounces out at the end (for the princess has more tiger in her personality than lady), most readers feel somehow tricked or cheated that the author leaves the final choice ostensibly open.  

Puzzle the Prof: The Ending of George Saunders' "Escape from Spiderhead"

Thanks to Keith Hood for playing my “Puzzle the Prof “ game during Short Story Month. Keith’s query is about George Saunders' story “Escape from Spiderhead,” which was selected for Best American Short Stories: 2011 and was included in his highly praised collection this year, Tenth of December.  I commented briefly on “Escape from Spiderhead” in blogs on both those collections, but said little about it because it is a “concept” “satiric” story, which I did not see as one of Saunders’ best.

What bothers Keith about the story is the ending, which is narrated by the first-person narrator after he kills himself.  Keith says when he realized that the ending of the story was going to be narrated from the beyond, he did “a mental equivalent of throwing something at the TV saying, "No, no, no. You can't end a first person narration that way. You've destroyed all believability."

For me, the issue of “believability” in a story is determined by my understanding of the “kind” of story it is, and since for me “Escape from Spiderhead” is a concept/satiric story, its believability is not dependent on its sticking to the rules of everyday reality, but rather sticking to the rules of the concept or satiric target that unifies it.

Saunders is not coy or mysterious about the concept at the center of this story.  At one point, Abnesti, the lab tech responsible for administering the experimental drugs to the human lab rats in the Spiderhead lab, states it quite explicitly. After having been induced by drugs to fall in love with (not just be sexually aroused by) two young women, Jeff is asked to decide which one he would choose to be administered a drug that induces suicidal depression.  When he cannot make a choice, Abnesti says the fact that he is totally cleansed of love for the two women is a “fantastic game-changer,” that they have unlocked a “mysterious eternal secret.”  If someone cannot love, the drug can make him love, if someone loves too much, the drug can tone it down.  “No longer, in terms of emotional controllability, are we ships adrift…. Can we stop war? We can sure as heck slow it down!”  With the drug, soldiers can be made to feel fond of each other, dictators can become great friends.

The satiric target is, of course, the contemporary use of drugs, many of which already exist, to govern the emotions,—drugs that induce euphoria, reduce (or cause) depression, create or increase desire, increase energy, etc.  The broad concept that governs the story is the eternal problem of human aggression.  Perhaps the most famous fictional exploration of this issue is Anthony Burgess’s novel Clockwork Orange, which Saunders obviously echoes in “Escape from Spiderhead.”

At every given moment throughout human history, people have killed each other for a variety of reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all.  It is the ultimate element of human freedom to be able to do so.  The Judeo/Christian mythos situates the origin of this freedom in the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain’s murder of his brother is the first sin of man against man in the Old Testament. But it is a sin that is possible only because of the previous Original Sin of humans against God.  As a result of eating the apple, the first humans are cast out of the Garden—separated from the God and nature with which they were formerly at one.  However, perhaps the most important result of the Fall is the separation of human beings from each other. 

The story of Cain and Abel is the inevitable result of this separation--a series of cumulative symbolic objectifications of the implicit reality of the Fall.  No real explanation is given for God’s making a distinction between the two brothers. Cain has given his best just as Abel has.  It is certainly not, as many casual readers think, that Cain offered rotten fruit.  Moreover, it trivializes the symbolic significance of a powerful story simply to attribute the distinction to the historical notion that the Old Testament God was partial to blood sacrifices.

God’s distinction may be better understood as an explicit objectification of what is implicit in the Fall:  All humans, even brothers, are ultimately separate.  By this act, God says, “You are isolated from one another.  It is therefore possible to make a distinction between you.”  Cain reacts to this realization by testing it in the extreme—by rising up against Abel and slaying him.  Cain kills Abel because he can, because he is separate from him, because he is free to do so.  God’s response is, of course, to make Cain the original symbol of isolated man.  He cuts him off from other men completely: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”  Thus begins the nightmare reality of man’s isolation from his fellow man—a reality that makes him horrifyingly free to slay his brother because he is separate from him.

When Jeff witnesses Heather’s anguish after being given the drug Darkenfloxx, and when he is given the drug Verbaluce, he eloquently expresses the central concept of the story:  “Every human is born of man and woman.  Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father.  Thus every human is worthy of love.”  He feels a great tenderness hard to “distinguish from a sort of vast existential nausea; to wit, why are such beautiful beloved vessels made slaves to so much pain?”

When Jeff must witness the other girl Rachel suffer, for the sake of the experiment, the suicide-inducing Darkenfloxx, he resists even though Abnesti tells him, “ A few minutes of unpleasantness for Rachel, years of relief for literally tens of thousands of underloving or overloving folks.”  When he realizes that they are going to Darkenfloxx Rachel just to hear him describe it, he knows that if he is not there to describe it, they would not do it.

Jeff’s decision to take an overdose of Darkenfloxx himself is a decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of Rachel.  Within the Judeo/Christian mythos, it is the Christ like decision to endure death in order to be resurrected to eternal life.  Death, of course, is the ultimate human mystery—a mystery that gives rise to all religion. Since an experience of the afterlife cannot be verified, there is no way the ideal of redemption can be substantiated except to follow Jeff’s consciousness into that afterlife. 

The notion of dying and then immediately hovering above the world one has just left is one of the most common concepts of after-death stories--from simple popular ghost stories to complex theological resurrection stories.  Within the Christian mythos, the ultimate aim of a life of sin and separation is to achieve redemption, thus ending a life of separation and entering that pre-Fall state of complete at-oneness.  To quote the words of an old hymn I heard my father sing as a child: “This world is not my home; I’m just passing through.” Thus, “Escape from Spiderhead” ends with an experience of the ultimate escape from our fallen state:

“From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward.  I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.”

In my opinion, from the perspective of the concept on which I think Saunders’ story is based, Jeff’s ascension into the afterlife of at-oneness, is not only believable, it is inevitable.

Thanks again to Keith Hood for his “Puzzle the Prof” challenge. I do not pose my explanation of the ending of “Escape from Spiderhead” as the only answer to his query—merely as my attempt to solve a narrative puzzle.

More "Puzzle the Prof" challenges in a couple of days.

Jamie Quatro's I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE: Pardon my Skepticism

It is not often that James Wood, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard and a staff writer/critic for The New Yorker, talks about short stories.  In his book How Fiction Works, you would think that the only fiction that works are novels, for he only briefly mentions three or four stories, e.g.  Joyce’s “The Dead,” Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog” and “The Kiss.”  His one sentence about the great fiction writer Alice Munro, who unfortunately, for Wood, only writes short stories, is: “All the great realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists.” 

 So when Wood devoted three full pages in the March 11, 2013 issue of The New Yorker to a debut collection of stories entitled I Want to Show You More by an unknown writer named Jamie Quatro, I sat up and took notice.  What was it about this collection of stories that originally appeared mostly in small circulation quarterlies that caught the eye of Professor James Wood, arguably one of the most influential literary critics in America today?

 Adultery! Virtual Sex! Religion!

 Wood predictably opened his piece by citing the great adultery novels, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, although he did give a nod to Chekhov’s story, “The Lady with the (Little, Pet, Lap) Dog.”  This was followed by a reference to Jesus’ seemingly contradictory judgments on adultery—let him who is without sin cast the first stone vs. he who has looked upon a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery. Wood argues that the first injunction (which involves deferring judgment) is a thoroughly novelistic gesture, while the second (thinking something is the same as doing it) is thoroughly anti-novelistic—“the enemy of fiction’s freedom.”  I am not sure exactly what Wood means by “novelistic” here, and he does not bother to enlighten me, assuming, I suppose, that it is perfectly obvious.

Based on his “novelistic” perspective, Wood says the best stories in I Want to Show You More are the stories about adultery, even though the “adultery” stories make up only about 12% of the book:

 “Caught Up”—3 pages

“Imperfections”—2 pages

“You Look Like Jesus”—2 pages

“Relatives of God”—2 pages

“Decomposition”—14 pages

 J. Robert Lennon in his New York Times review, which also appears in The International Herald Tribune, does not find the adultery stories so intriguing.   He says that I Want to Show You More organizes itself around “two magnetic poles,”—“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement,” in which runners in a marathon must carry weighted statues with phalluses, and “Demolition,” about the effect on a small town church of a charismatic deaf man who begins the gradual physical destruction of the church that finally leads to much of the congregation returning to a primitive state. Lennon is of the opinion that the very brief stories about adultery that Wood likes so much clutter the book and would have worked better had they been parts of a longer story.  Lennon concludes that although Quatro is gifted at “conventional psychological realism, she is strongest when she ventures into the fantastic.”

 And what is it about the adultery stories—which Quatro classifies as “flash” pieces--that so engages James Wood?  He says they are: “passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable for their brave dualism.” However, I am not sure if Wood admires Quatro’s philosophic bravery of body/spirit dualism or her social bravery in being so forthcoming in her sexual openness.  

Wood is quite taken by the fact that Quatro’s female character (it seems to be the same character in all five of the stories) “yearn and lust, and that the stories articulate that lustful yearning with an exciting literary freedom.” The word “freedom” is not defined here; but surely Wood does not mean female literary sexual “freedom.” Everyone knows that Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James is a woman; perhaps Wood is using “literary” in an honorific way that elevates Quatro’s stories above best-selling soft core. 

Wood is particularly impressed by the fact that the infidelities and imagined infidelities in Quatro’s stories “play out against the shadow of Christian belief and Christian prohibition,” which Wood says is unusual in modern fiction generally. I am not sure it has ever been unusual. Or is it just that New Yorker folk are of the mind that Christians eschew sex generally.  He also seems to be quite fascinated by the fact that much of the adultery in the stories is phone/email sex—sex that does not actually happen except in the imagination.  This long distance love, it seems, is a uniquely modern innovation, according to Wood, as if Elizabeth and Robert Browning never wrote letters to each other.

Wood reminds us that short fiction is “closer to poetry than the novel, and very short fiction is even closer.”   He singles out the first story, “Caught Up,” an image of “my wrists pinned over my head” that he says sounds like an “erotic crucifixion.” Imagine, if you will, the woman as Jesus.  He also cites an image of a kiss in the companion story, “Imperfections,” which the woman says is “Like you put a seal on my forehead and hot wax dripped down into my eye.” Wood says this echoes the Song of Solomon verse, “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealously as cruel as the grave.”  Note, however, that only the word “seal” in the Quatro story echoes the Psalmist, not the poetic use of it. 

It is this combination of the “secular and religious” that so fascinates Wood, as if it were an absolutely new phenomenon, in spite of the fact that, as every English major knows, John Donne’s religious poems are quite sensual and his love poems are quite sacred—so much so you can often not distinguish which is which.  Quatro did not learn this technique from the metaphysical poets, but rather from the quintessential minimalist Amy Hempel (Quatro’s thesis director).  Indeed, when Quatro tells one interviewer, “A lot of what I write starts with a cadence,” that each one of her stories has its own “music,” she is repeating something she has heard her mentor say, as Hempel did once in an interview:

 “Often I’ve started a story knowing the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, but without knowing what the words are. I’ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and over again and then this tune will be translated into a sentence. I trust that. There’s something visceral about the musical quality of a sentence.”

Indeed, it may be the visceral that most appeals to James Wood  in these stories; however, it does not seem to be the musical visceral quality of Quatro’s sentences, but the physicality suggested by the female  narrator of the four short “flash” stories.  

Baynard Woods in The Baltimore City Paper and Rebecca Jones Schinsky on the Book Riot blog are perhaps more straightforward about this visceral appeal.  Woods rather extravagantly says that occasionally a book can “shake the world awake with its extraordinary singular vision and voice, reinvigorating language,” concluding that Jamie Quatro’s I Want to Show You More, which he calls sexy in “a scary sort of way” is such a book—and “Holy fuck, is it” 

 Rebecca Jones Schinsky is even more obvious about Quatro’s appeal: “Yowza…This one is going to be big…It’s so good, I kind of want to lick it.” You can’t get more visceral than that.

 What’s scary about the sex in Quatro’s stories?  Maybe it has to do with lines like these:

            “I recognized the feeling—what I felt every time the other man, the faraway man, told me what he would do if he had me in person, my wrists pinned over my head.

It would be devotional, he’d said.  I would lay myself on your tongue like a Communion wafer.”

He’d taken a picture of himself at that very moment….One hand was holding the phone to his ear, the other arm flung out to the side.  His mouth was open slightly, his brow furrowed as if in pain.  An erection arched rose-colored against his navel.

And what do I look like to you now, he said.”

 “Won’t you send me a picture of your foot, breast, ear, some part of you so long as it’s you; and when I said, Well, but there are freckles, plus this funky trilobite mole just above my navel, he said—another thing I hope he remembers---But it’s your imperfections I want to fuck.”

Yowza!  Holy fuck! 

I must say I am skeptical about the extravagant praise heaped on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection.  The fantasy/parable/fable stories, such as “Demolition,” “Sinkhole,” and “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” seem, on their surface, interesting tropes, but when you examine them more closely, their metaphors do not hold up.  And the sexy flash stories seem interesting only because, well, they are sexy.  The rest of the stories seem just ordinary.

The book has not been reviewed widely and has not appeared on any best-seller lists I have seen, but from the “blurbs” on the back cover you would think Quatro’s stories are brilliant examples of the genre.  I know that you cannot really trust the objectivity of blurbs.  I mean, after all, publishers would not print a blurb if it were not great praise.  But sometimes blurbs go a bit too far, don’t you think.  Basically, they are “advertising,” and maybe we should not expect “truth in advertising.” 

But Good Lord!  David Gates blurbs the stories as a “miracle in which any reader can believe.” Tom Bissell says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what short fiction is for.”  Tom Franklin blurbs that he salutes a”brilliant new American writer.”   

But the blurb that shocks me most is when David Means, who in my opinion is one of today's greatest American short story writers, says Quatro has “earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro.”  

 Well, maybe almost Amy Hempel.  But surely David Means does not think Quatro is in the same literary universe as Alice Munro and Lydia Davis.  And a final skepticism: Even though some of Quatro’s former teachers, such as Jill McCorkle, provide blurbs for her book, why did she not get a blurb from her thesis director, Amy Hempel?

Ron Rash's NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

I have read all the stories in Ron Rash’s previous two major collections: Chemistry and Other Stories, Picador Paperback Original, 2007; and Burning Bright, HarperCollins, 2010, which won the richly endowed Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize (35,000 Euro [$45,900] in 2010). He had his first big success with his novel Serena, which was a New York Times bestseller; you can get a bitter taste of its titular character in the story “Pemberton’s Bride” in the collection Chemistry. I think the stories in his new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay are his best yet.

Rash stands to enjoy even more success with the upcoming film based on the novel, directed by Susanne Bier and staring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as newly-married Serena and George Pemberton building a timber empire in Depression-Era North Carolina. The film is scheduled for release on September 27, 2013.

Rash’s stories has appeared in the best quarterlies, such as Sewanee Review, South Carolina Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review, but perhaps not often read in those low-circulation journals.  He did not make it to The New Yorker until the May 23, 2011 edition with the opening story to Nothing Gold Can Stay, “Trusty.”  It is not one of Rash’s best stories, but with its careful control of the old “biter-bite” story, it is a good introduction to Rash’s management of the short story form.

I like the stories of Ron Rash, although, as I have noted in previous essays, I am a bit skeptical when writers run the risk of exploring or exploiting the people from the Appalachian Mountains who I grew up with.  Rash’s stories have their complement of hardheaded old hillbillies and meth-headed young no-accounts.  But he does not condescend to them.  He may not always like them, but he always respects them.  And he always seems to know what is in their hearts. 

 For example, in the title story (the title also of a Robert Frost poem you can find online), two young men break into an old man’s house to steal gold uniform buttons, souvenirs of war.  But even as we are disgusted by their act, at the end of the story, even as the young man who tells the story pops the pills they have bought into his mouth, he looks toward the river and sees a lantern or a campfire.  “Out beyond it, fish move in the current, alive in that other world.”

One of my favorite stories in Nothing Gold Can Stay, because it embodies the kind of delicate poetry that saves Rash’s often coarse and ignorant characters from our scorn, is “Something Rich and Strange”—an extended prose poem about a young girl who gets carried away in a fast-moving stream and drowns.  What the diver, whose story it is, goes in the water to find her body finds at the bottom of the stream, he does find something “rich and strange” about the nature of human vulnerability and the harsh beauty of time. 

Another favorite, also an extended poem, is the concluding story, “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” in which two old friends, Carson and Darnell, both who have lost their wives and live alone, deliver a breech calf together.  The story ends with them shaking hands and Carson driving away, thinking, “Darnell would hang the lantern back on its nail, maybe smoke another cigarette as he stood at the barn mouth, attentive as any good sentry.”

The trouble with writing about Ron Rash’s stories is that anything you might say about them is likely to be a spoiler.  That can be both a good thing and a bad thing.  On the one hand, Rash’s stories always seem more than just their plots, so a plot summary would not tell you a whole lot; on the other hand, a plot summary would indeed “spoil” the pleasure of following a story’s deceptively simple narrative movement toward an ending that crystallizes everything.

In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin notes Rash’s gift for “hard-hitting surprise endings,” adding that both Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling would have loved “A Sort of Miracle,” the hilarious story of an accountant named Denton saddled with two worthless brother-in-laws that his wife won’t let him throw out.  Because of their wallowing around on the couch all day watching medical shows, Denton has begun to experience what medical folks nowadays call erectile dysfunction. 

Rather than embarrass himself by going to a doctor and then to a drugstore to get Viagra, Denton goes into the mountains (taking his no-account brother-in-laws with him) to trap a bear, having read that an old Chinese medicine to cure ED uses the paws and gall bladder of a bear. The ending isn‘t pretty, and to laugh at it, which you can’t help doing, might make you feel a little heartless. I am not going to tell you the ending, for that would be a spoiler.

“A Servant of History” is about a British academic who comes to Appalachia in the early 1920s to find and transcribe mountain songs that have their roots in English ballads.  He knows little or nothing about folks who live in the North Carolina hills, so when he finds an old woman whose name suggests Scottish origins, he pompously plays up his own Scottish roots with, as usual in a Rash story, disastrous results—also funny, but also painful. Again, I am not going to tell you the ending, which is poetically justice and an emblem of the man’s ignorance.

In “Twenty-Six Days” the narrator, a janitor at a regional college, has bought a copy of Chekhov’s stories for his daughter and sits in his truck reading the story “Misery” about the man who has lost his son and no one will listen to him but the horse that pulls his coach.  Although the janitor says, “You’d think a story like that would be hokey,” it brings tears to his eyes.

And then there is “The Dowry,” which involves the need to exact revenge for an old Civil War veteran’s lost hand; the story ends with a potentially simplistic solution, but which, as usual, Rash manages to bring off painfully but believably.

In “Cherokee,” a young couple goes to an Indian casino and tries to turn $157 into a thousand dollars so they can make back payments on a truck they bought. You expect the worse when they win the thousand and then must decide whether to go on, but Rash is not that easy.

In “The Magic Bus,” a young woman named Sabra comes to the aid of a hippie couple whose car boils over while driving by the North Carolina farm where she seems destined to spend her life.  Of course they invite her to come with them, and of course, she is tempted to do so, but then Rash does the unexpected again

Matthew Gilbert in his review of Nothing Gold Can Stay in The Boston Globe says that although “violent twists,” “unexpected and haunting,” mark all the stories, Rash does not present puzzles in his fiction, not does he play tricks; his stories tend toward “a carefully gauged ambiguity that can leave a reader retracing events, asking:  What really just happened?”  And this, of course, is a characteristic that makes any summary of the plots of the story spoilers, albeit simplistic spoilers.

I not only like Ron Rash’s short stories, I also like it that he understands the short story as a form that may begin with a single image or an overheard remark which, with honest exploration and a keen sense of the language, becomes something unpredictable and meaningful.  Although Rash’s stories depend on plot, they never seem planned. Rash has said:

 I never outline, I never plot. I really don’t know where it’s going. Maybe I have a vague idea, but I think sometimes there’s a danger that comes from having an outline, that you’re kind of putting it on rails, not allowing the story to jump off and go to a place that is surprising to the reader, and to you as a writer. I go by instinct, and that’s scary. Usually when I write a novel, I can have worked about a year and it’ll die on me. I don’t know where it’s going, and it feels hopeless. There can be three, four months where it just seems dead. I almost always start with an image. I just see where the image will take me.”
 

I also like his respectful understanding of the poetic nature of the form.  In a Daily Beast interview, Rash talked about the difference between writing poetry, novels and short stories:

“I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry—the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible—but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.”

 You might suspect that I am partial to Ron Rash’s stories because I am an old hillbilly myself who can’t resist stories about a region and a people I know well.  I admit I enjoy reading fiction about people of the Appalachian Mountains; I have even written a story or two about those people.  I would like to think that my mountain background makes me a demanding reader of such stories, for I cannot abide outsiders who know little about mountain people but try to write about them anyway, or, worse, mountain writers who think they have “got above their raisin” and condescend to their ancestors and their neighbors. Ron Rash, in my opinion, is neither.

The Concept Story: Karen Russell's VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE

It’s a rare pleasure when, at the same time, two out of ten books on various “best-seller” lists are collections of short stories--which was indeed the case for a few weeks last month when George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove claimed that coveted place.  Although the two collections share some characteristics that partially explain their popularity—fantasy, satire, social criticism, whimsy, witty intelligence—in my opinion, George Saunders’ collection is more “inspired” and imaginatively unpredictable than the stories of Karen Russell.

In several of these stories, it looks like Karen Russell is up to her old tricks. Well, actually new tricks, since she was only 25 when her first book St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves came out six years ago.  Her first novel Swamplandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, unfortunately and inexplicably, the year that the judges decided not to award a prize for fiction. In my blog on the St Lucy’s collection, I suggested that it was a youthful book in many ways. My old guy reaction to the stories was that they were fun to read as childlike fantasies that illuminated some of childhood’s strangeness, but that they lacked the depth that real exploration of these experiences require.

Although I enjoyed reading Russell’s stories in both her collections, I sometimes felt it was, if you will forgive me, a cheap thrill—a kind of Ray Bradbury, T.C. Boyle, Stephen King kind of thrill  (apologies to all Bradbury/Boyle/King fans), whose stories I enjoy reading, but who cleverly stay on the surface.  In my opinion, Russell is a fine writer who knows her away around a sentence, an image, a metaphor with what one reviewer has called “pixie” charm—apologies to Tinkerbell—but I still fail to see any depth in her work.  Yeah, yeah, I know—everything doesn’t have to have depth!

The basic problem I have with Russell is that she writes concept stories—stories that start with an idea and stick with it—e.g. the idea of kicking a habit vis-à-vis vampires and lemon juice; the idea of feminist liberation, vis-à-vis Japanese girls rebelling against producing silk from their own bodies.

Ron Rash (whose new collection Nothing Gold Can Stay I will talk about in a week or two) expressed my reservations about the “concept” story quite well in a short piece in The Wall Street Journal, 3/8/13.  Rash said that like most fiction writers, he is often asked where he gets his ideas, to which he answers, “I have no idea,” adding that if ideas were gettable, like in a secluded cave somewhere, he would not go get them, for “an "idea," especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.”

Rash says the best example is the difference between Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and A Fable.  Faulkner once said that The Sound and the Fury began as a single image—“a child in a tree watching adults at a wake.” The Fable, however, began and ended with an idea—if Christ returned to earth he would be crucified again—an idea that Faulkner outlined chapter by chapter and followed scrupulously.  Whereas The Sound and the Fury is a dynamic, living book one of Faulkner’s best, a Fable is “tedious, lifeless, imprisoned within its idea.”

  

The fact that Russell’s stories are concept stories springing from some “idea” is suggested by Fiona Wilson’s review in The Times of London, who says she wishes she could have been there at the moment when a story like the title story was conceived.  In fact, Karen Russell has talked a bit about when this story was conceived.  She says she was in a lemon grove with her siblings and saw a very tan, elderly man sucking on a lemon and said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if lemons were just like vampire methadone and that man is a vampire with a tan.” 

Even though none of her siblings thought the “what if” idea was funny, Russell says there was something about the premise: “The ‘what if’ was set up in such a way that it felt like: here was the place where I could explore some questions.  A diorama where I could explore the question that seems almost too huge to confront in realist fiction.”  Well, I am not sure what “huge” question Russell had in mind, unless it was addiction as a social problem.  If so, it seems to me that the cleverness of the story undercuts any serious such intention.  And furthermore I am not sure I would be interested in a story that existed solely for such a serious intention.

Joy Williams, one of my favorite short story writers, also suggests the concept nature of Russell’s stories by opening her New York Times review with the notion that if you gave Karen Russell an assignment to write a story about an ex-president who is reincarnated as a horse and put her in a room with a couple of pencils and one arm tired behind her back, she would come up with “The Barn at the End of Our Term.”  The result is a comic romp, but little else, about Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19^th president of the United States who exists in a sort of limbo state after death as a horse longing for his wife Lucy, who maybe has been transmuted into a winsome sheep. Other ex-presidents are featured, such as Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and James Garfield.

In my discussion of Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, I suggested that Russell raises the suspicion that many of her early stories were written as class assignments. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except writing to an assignment is sort of like teaching to the test, isn’t it?  It could lead to a narrow sort of focus aimed to please. Now, I am not sure it is MFA-assignment-fulfillment that drives Russell’s stories, but something more linked to her creative procedure of conceiving a concept and following it relentlessly.

A less funny, even somewhat tedious, concept story is “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Tailgating in the Antarctic,” about--in big sports fan fashion--the Food Chain Games that pits the Team Krill against the Team Whale. As you might guess, in spite of devoted tailgating fans, the Krills have never won a game, always being sucked up into the maw of devouring whales, each year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 being eaten.  It is a simple, conceptually comic, trope meant to be a satire on big time sports, but it is just a self-indulgently romp.

As you might expect, the two stories for which reviews have the most respect are the stories that seem to carry the most significant social satire/social message weight:

“The New Veterans,” which focuses on a massage therapist who treats a veteran of the Iraq War suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.  She discovers that if she massages a tattoo on his back that depicts a roadside bomb that killed one of his friends, the tattoo becomes animated and that she can manipulate images on it, for example moving the sun from one spot to another, indeed, even managing to change history seemingly frozen on the veteran’s back.

“Proving Up,” whose concept is that the Homestead Act of the 1870s in Nebraska had one perverse requirement so typical of politicians out of touch with everyday human reality—in order to be granted claim to a homestead, every house had to have at least one glass window, even though the “houses” were more like animal burrows underground.  Since the poor farmers cannot all afford glass windows, they pass around one single window before the arrival of the Inspector who determines if they are allowed to keep their farm. In the story, the task is given to an 11-year old boy, and the result is a nightmarish journey that comes to a horrific ending

Other concept stories include:

“Reeling for the Empire,” It’s one thing to work in a silk factory, but quite another to do so as a magically transformed silkworm, your body spinning out the silk in a nineteenth-century Japanese extreme version of a sweatshop.

“The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” the subject of which is school bullying, here embodied in a boy who feels guilt for his participation in the tormenting of a kid with epilepsy who disappears and comes back as a scarecrow.

In “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979” an Australian boy finds a hollow tree in which seagulls have deposited lost objects, some of them from the future.

An interesting critical difference of opinion about which Russell stories are most successful and thus whether Russell’s success as a short story writer depends on a poetic fantastical style or on concept-driven socially significant plots can be seen in the contrasting comments made by brilliant short story writer Joy Williams and influential critic/reviewer Michiko Kakutani in bookended New York Times reviews.

Williams says, “A grim, stupendous, unfavorable magic is at work in these stories.  They are not chicly ironic or satiric and certainly not existentially or ethically curious.”  She says, however, that “The New Veterans”(a social/realist/critical favorite) is sentimental, that its fundamental situation is so familiar that its “intention becomes obvious and must be laboriously realized.”   Williams argues that the story is not energized by the” unerringly knowing and mischievous planchette that unequivocally belongs” to Karen Russell.

Michiko Kakutani, the star reviewer for The New York Times, on the other hand, says that “The New Veterans” is the “emotional centerpiece” of the collection, a story that perhaps begins as a takeoff of Ray Bradbury’s famous “Illustrated Man” and “quickly evolves into a complex, deeply affecting exploration of the ways memories can crystallize or redeem the past, and the ways the process of storytelling itself can remake history.”

Perhaps the best mediation between these two perspectives is provided by M. John Harrison in The Guardian, who says that as long as Russell’s stories are “fragile tissues of word, image, and emotions,” they have unbelievable strength, but when she pushes these images into a narrative, they get weak: “The two styles of communication interfere with one another, then the plot prances off with the bit between its teeth, shedding subtleties as it goes.” 

And perhaps here we have the basic critical question about the stories of Karen Russell:  Is she the protégé of Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme, or is she a child of The Twilight Zone and Stephen King? 

Jess Walter's WE LIVE IN WATER: Stories for the Beach, not the Study

 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.