Outlaws and Inlaws #19: Better Late than never? BEST Late FOREVER

I meant to stay timely with this series of short fiction anthology reviews, but life... got in the way. 


From Best American Short Stories:

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver: Two men (one narrates, the other doesn't) are drying out together in a rehab house for alcoholism. As they swap stories it turns out that, surprise surprise, these guys have hurt a variety of women and children along the way. Some of the drama hinges on the ways the men do or don't attempt to repair these relationships, along with observations on the different people you meet in a detox facility (I could have read an entire second story about a would-be wheeler-dealer who treats the place like a business meet-and-greet). A startling betrayal rounds off the story, which is as hard-boiled as they come, without any guns or killings.

Janus by Ann Beattie: A realtor relies on a bowl to help her sell houses. It's an object of quiet beauty; not the sort of thing that announces its loveliness, but which adds grace and style wherever it is placed. Her relationship with the bowl seems like a small thing, at first, but over the course of 6 pages we learn that the bowl is a continuation of, or replacement for, a different relationship.

The fungibility of emotional energy from people to things or places is one of the most troubling themes in my life, and this story, which I've read several times now, is helping me confront that. Of course, it can be a good thing. A friend of mine once responded to a breakup by throwing himself into volunteerism, and was the point man in the construction of a ornamental garden. Years later, we saw photos of his former girlfriend from that breakup happily touring the garden, to which he replied "She has no idea the extent to which that garden is a monument to her." I think about that a lot.

Anyway, Beattie is one of the iconic New Yorker writers, and the legend of New Yorker stories is that the editor lops off the final paragraph to leave things ambiguous, but I like how this one ends with a completely effective O. Henry twist.


From Calling the Wind:

White Rat by Gayl Jones: A young African-American man, known as White Rat, looks white, and this genetic quirk scrambles his life. He kicks back against white people trying to claim him, but when his wife gives birth to a club-footed child, Rat takes out his frustrations with this situation by addressing wife and child in racist terms, as if he were an ofay after all. When he and his friends all get arrested, he's kept in a separate cell, and can't convince the cops that he's black. He uses drink to both relieve and exacerbate his problems.

Jones writes with sympathy for Rat and his family, but delights in peppering Rat's first-person narrative with comical malapropisms, until it's hard to know where fun ends and education shaming begins. Nonetheless, it's a vigorous example of vernacular prose.

Loimos by Edgar Nkose White: The title is apparently Greek for either a pestilence or a pestilential person. This story, told in epigrammatically descriptive first person, reads like a post-apocalyptic SF novel, and while there are dire hints that the nature of the plague ruining everything is a mysterious disease, racism and heroin are also implicated. The narrator unspools a grim account of making a life in the ghetto. Sex plays a large part, and be warned he's not exactly complementary to his multiple partners. He's sexist, although it's unclear whether the author is expressing his own poisoned view of women or is dramatizing the sexism that is a common expression of a low-expectations outlook. There's also a burst of antisemitism directed at merchants who leave town as soon as the business day is concluded. But none of this ugliness undermines the point, since the point is that ghetto life makes people twisted and dysfunctional. A slipstream story from before that term existed, this is a sorrowful and outraged view of life under urban racism that uses the expressive qualities of SF without knuckling under to genre plot troupes.


From Plays in One Act:

Linda Her by Harry Kondoleon: One of those "someone has a mid-life crisis/nervous breakdown and makes everybody else in her life miserable before doing something drastic" plays, and I don't mean this as a criticism. Carol is on vacation with her sleepy husband, clever daughter, and good-natured best friend. Over the course of about 15 minutes, Carol makes it clear that she feels trapped by mortality and banality, and wants out. She has no idea what she wants her life to be like, in part because, as she says to her husband, "Aren't you sick of me? I'm sick of me."

The other characters respond to this in a variety of plausible ways, but plausibility isn't gonna sooth Carol's anxiety. She probably needs medication, but the play ends with her bugging out, and the others trying to rewire their relationships to deal with this unexpected absence. Kondoleon doesn't put his thumb on the scales regarding where our sympathies should lie, which I appreciated. He gives us the latitude to consider each character's needs. 

I liked this play enough to look up the author, and found this terrific article which shed a lotta light on Kondoleon's influences and aesthetic (his Sylvia Plath fixation seems highly relevant, although there's a heaping helping of Tennessee Williams to it as well). Rest in peace, Harry.

Success by Arthur Kopit: Content warning: suicide. Let us turn from a sympathetic portrait of despair to a jokey one. Kopit occasionally writes plays that are pastiches of his peers (Bone-the-Fish is his variation on Mamet), which is odd given the infrequency of Kopit's output; why not deliver something more unique, if you're only going to emerge from your cave once or twice a decade? This short item is a despairing riff on Edward Albee's difficult, unloved The Man With Three Arms, in which a faded celebrity does a paid speech that goes bizarrely awry. In Kopit's version, the author of a popular and esteemed book has a complete meltdown and either commits, or hallucinates that he commits, suicide at a public reading. His meltdown is espresso-dark comedy, right up to the ending. One might hope that the author of Wings, a play that took dementia seriously, would handle suicide with similar consideration and restraint, but here Kopit's back in the daffy absurdist vein of his breakout Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You In the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. Ending a story with a suicide is a conventional just-add-water way for short filmmakers etc. to bring borrowed gravitas to their cheap twist endings, and although Kopit's mournful setup/punchline is sharply crafted, it does feel a bit like he's defaulting to suicide because he couldn't come up with anything better.

While we're discussing Kopit: if you really want to cackle, seek out his last play, originally titled Y2K and later retitled BecauseHeCan. It's a clueless, unironic Reefer Madness take on a Dark Web Hacker who ruins a nice couple's life, and it's absurd in ways I don't think Kopit intended. An alarmist cautionary tale about technological dangers that Kopit doesn't really understand. Aficionados of camp (very much in the Sontagian vein of failed art) should track it down.


From Interzone:

The FLASH! Kid by Scott Bradfield: The son of an intolerable rich bigot and his forlorn, trashy wife amuses himself by harrying a stump full of termites, but he discovers a strange artifact in the core of the nest. Soon the boy is eating too much and bloating in a worrying fashion, while a shifty researcher tries to puzzle out what's happening.

Bradfield writes with comic panache, a bit like the comic SF collaborations of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and I'm a sucker for SF stories that explore puberty, disease, and aging through genre tropes (such as Alien, Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion...) but this one builds to a shaggy-dog rude joke of an ending that felt like a novelization of a Zap comic. The least rewarding story in this anthology so far, despite some pungent social satire.


 
From The Outlaw Bible:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: You may have read this in school, but at this point in his career Bradbury was bringing an elegance to his prose that SF mostly lacked, and it's worth revisiting his Sandburgian flow. The book-burners of the story are oddly gentle compared to real world tyrannies; Bradbury's firemen burn books while trying to spare people and things, although in this excerpt a book lover seizes the moral high ground by lighting a match and setting herself ablaze along with the books. A contemporary real life totalitarian regime would go ahead and burn people along with the books, then rely on spin doctors to justify everything they did.


The Lost by Jack Ketchum: The late Ketchum wrote horror stories that make me genuinely uncomfortable, because I'm never entirely sure where the author stood regarding the sadism of his villains and the sufferings of his protagonists. This harrowing excerpt of a novel inspired by a real life serial killer leads me to think he's on the victim's side... probably. He sticks with a victim's point of view, and builds sympathy for her even while seeming to revel in describing the most sickening cruelties. Ketchum knew what he liked.

Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick: A robot barges in to a couples home and, in the course of doing a sales pitch for itself, smashes everything and terrorizes the humans with a level of dysfunctionality that was, like so much of Dick's writing, prescient. The disconnect between the banal sales pitch and the over-the-top slapstick of a towering robot crushing all your stuff is the core of the comic horror, and no one did comic horror quite like Dick; he was like Kafka with a black-and-white television. There's some dumb gender stuff (the woman's "breasts quiver(ed) with excitement...") but in Dick's nominal defense, he did a bunch of drugs, so some stupidity was bound to creep in.

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker: an excerpt from the story that served as the source for Barker's brilliant movie Hellraiser. Fans of that film should check out the barmy prose version, which includes a bunch of elements that were left out of the film, or changed (the creature known to fans as Pinhead has a high feminine voice in the original, unlike the deep, menacing, masculine declamations of the film version). Unlike Ketchum, Barker makes a point of writing about horrors that cannot be imitated by halfwitted criminals, so, for example, his villains force their victims to have such acute sensitivity that they can smell everything really well. Horrible, when you think about it! And Barker makes you think about it.