short stories | Seattle Book Mama

Well of course it’s a five-star book; these stories are the winners! And having just read them, and changed my mind over and over as to which was my real favorite, rather like being at a banquet and being served all of one’s favorite foods, I was at something of a loss to find one that rose above the others…until the very end, and if I had to choose one of them, that would be it. That one, or Russell Banks’s “A Permanent Member of the Family”, a poignant, terrible, magnificent story that I had actually already read and reviewed about a year ago in a collection by that author. So, it goes without saying that Banks is a giant, and I just sort of set him aside with the knowledge that he was untouchable, and then read and compared the rest. But why take my word for it? Don’t just listen to me! Look here at how I’ve rambled on forever without mentioning that I got this book scot free (lucky me) from Net Galley and Knopf Doubleday Publishers in exchange for an honest review. This outstanding collection will be available for purchase September 15. I don’t know how you can bear to wait that long!

Okay, let’s try this again. See, it’s almost impossible to compare them, but here are some things I can say about the collection as a whole: first, that it is a multicultural collection, but it doesn’t appear to me as if anybody laid out special rules that said anyone had to vote for this, that, the other culture. They’re all really strong. There was never a moment where something went thud and I wondered how the hell that story got in here. I obsessively made notes on my kindle whenever I came to something that was funny, interesting, or—oh especially this!—when I found incredibly effective, purposeful figurative language. If I still taught (well okay, if I still taught, I wouldn’t have time to read galleys), but if I still taught, I would get a good hard copy of this book to slide under the projector in order to illuminate what the various types of figurative language look like when they’ve been used well. If I still taught and had an actual book buying budget, I would get an entire class set so that students could go through and find the passages for themselves, which is actually a much more powerful way to teach, and then I’d have them write their own stories and be gob-smacked by how much they had improved over the course of a week or so, just from reading a few choice, selected stories.

But I don’t teach anymore, and I do read a lot of books and write a lot of reviews, and I am telling you, this is better than what I generally read, and I’ve been reading good stuff, too. The last story in the collection, “Birdsong from the Radio”, by Elizabeth McCracken, is not only outstanding, but it’s chilling, horrifying, and absolutely fabulous read-aloud material for the month of October.

But if, like me, you no longer have anyone except other adults surrounding you now, you should get this collection for yourself. Read it on the beach; in a chilly, air-conditioned motel room; or snug by the fire this fall. Because this is what excellence looks like. It’s gluttony for the voracious reader, and extremely tempting, I should think, for the reluctant one.

When I was a kid, I often bore the distinction of being the second-smartest kid in the class. You’d think it would be an honor, but then, how often do we watch silver medalists at the Olympics stand ashamed, tears streaming, because they were not the very, very best? And so as I read these gob-smackingly brilliant short stories by Doctorow, I know exactly who he would have been in my life. He would have been that smartest kid, that gold medalist. I could never even touch his writing ability with anything I produced.

Back when I was that second-smartest student, I would have burned with envy at Doctorow’s brilliance, but now I can only bow in awe. What talent—and what a work ethic! He has produced prodigious prose over his lifetime, and I don’t think he has ever published anything that wasn’t top drawer work.

Here’s his author blurb, lifted from Goodreads.com:

“Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.”

I rest my case, at least in terms of the author’s overall prowess. And no friends, I did not read this as an ARC; I don’t think Doctorow even needs people like me reviewing him, but I do so because it brings me joy. I ferreted this hardcover treasure from among the stacks at my favorite Seattle used book store, Magus Books, in the University of Washington neighborhood. I considered the used-book price a steal, and have enjoyed all of the stories included here.

One section is devoted to “Liner Notes”, and this one is from the liner notes to Billy Bathgate (also highly recommended). He describes a fugue state in which he is walking, yet dreaming:

“…it walks me through the underworld of the dreaming masses, where this pudgy demon of truth, W.C. Fields, with his dirty top hat, his run-down elegance of manners, his drunken scrollwork of a personality, presides over the technology of our souls…the clown won’t go away, you see…leading him through the window over the great landscape of the underworld that looks so beautiful from the window of this safe house and showing him what it really is. And he sees the bubbling sulfur pits of intentions, and the slake mountain of ideals, and great gray ash as far as he can see, the ashes of innocence creased by rivers of blood.”

Not everything he writes is in this flowery style, lest it exhaust us; instead, he intersperses it with other brilliantly funny work. “A House on the Plains” is dry wit at its best. Earle and his mother roam from one town to another, and gradually we come to understand why they have to keep moving. In one location, Earle is to call his mother “Aunt Dora”, and his mother has really outdone herself. Earle is used to a certain level of weirdness, but he can’t help inquiring, in the wake of her many troubling preparations for what is to come, “Aunt Dora, I said, what are we up to here?” (The author uses no quotation marks in this story, but it won’t muddy the meaning at all…and he makes up for it with his grammar police references in the final story, for which the book is titled.)

“Walter John Harmon” was one of my favorites; it features a religious cult, and is so wry and cutting that it made me laugh out loud in places.

The final piece, in which the writer makes better use of repetition as figurative language than anyone I have ever read before, is the coup de grace, and one can see why it is placed last; it leaves one holding the book with the sure and certain knowledge that it cannot be given away to a friend or relative, but must be nested softly back on the shelf. In my case, it will go in a small section of novels written by this remarkable word smith.

Has it just been published? Oh no no no. You will have to work to find it as I did. Well, of course you could check with various online retailers, and likely you would find a copy more easily than my breathless treasure hunt in the back stacks at Magus.

But if you love and respect good writing, you will do yourself a favor if you get a hold of it, one way or another, and dive in as soon as you can offer your complete attention.