Mary is a college professor who learned early on to be careful of what she said in the classroom and at departmental meetings. She led a bland, circumspect life for which she was unrewarded. Her college closed, her health grew worse. But suddenly a colleague, now at another school, offered her an interview for a good position. She travels there and learns that she is the minority candidate that will never get the job. So she uses her time at a lecture, to say all the things she held back for many years.
"Next Door" is about a couple enduring the fights next door interwoven with the movie El Dorado.
This is Tobias Wolff's first collection of stories. My favorite piece of writing from him was THIS BOY'S LIFE, a companion piece to THE DUKE OF DECEPTION, by his brother, Geoffrey. I was fortunate to hear both of them speak once in the town where I now live.
The stories in this collection seem a bit old-fashioned now in how straight forward they are told. I like them like that.
Jerry House *Jerry, I could not comment on your blog.
11 comments:
Always room for such an approach. Some of the minimalists fetishize it, but that will happen...I haven't yet read his brother's work.
I actually like the straightforward approach, too, Patti. And this sounds like an interesting collection.
I agree with you about the brothers' books about their parents, which I read back to back, but I really like Tobias's short stories too.
Currently finishing up the first Captain Leopold collection by Ed Hoch. It's interesting. It started out in the early 1960s as pretty much your straight police procedurals. But by ten years later, even though the stories were still procedurals, he started putting in more "impossible crime" elements as in his Sam Hawthorne and other series. This includes "The Leopold Locked Room," where Leopold's extremely bitter ex-wife, who blames him for all the troubles in her life, is murdered under locked room-type conditions right in front of him, with no other possible suspects that the Captain. The solution was one used in a JONATHAN CREEK episode, and which I'm sure Agatha Christie used long before that. But it proves that even at their simplest, Hoch's stories are always worth reading.
I loved Jonathan Creek when we were in England for a year. I probably only saw one season's worth. You know, I don't read enough "fun" books. This sounds like fun.
We have the complete set of JONATHAN CREEK DVDs. I think it is on Britbox or Acorn, but the American versions of some of the early ones are edited differently than the British originals, cutting out some key stuff (other than the mysteries). We've started watching them from the beginning on Saturday Brit Nights.
There are so many authors I have never heard of. I have no familiarity with either Tobias or Geoffrey Wolff. I like straightforward stories.
Theirs is an interesting story. Each tells half of it in THIS BOY'S LIFE and DUKE OF DECEPTION.
Thanks, Patti. I had found some information about Tobias but not Geoffrey. Now I have looked into him more too. The two memoirs both sound interesting, but even more interesting is that they both became writers. Tobias was born in Birmingham, Alabama and Geoffrey was born in Hollywood, California.
Hoch is almost always at least worth reading, even with the occasional rock in the tapioca (though Hoch, I continue to suspect, is always trying to suggest the characters who use obnoxious language, even when it was more "acceptable" when the stories were written and published, have something a bit Off about them, even if it is curable ignorance).
On one of my logins, on one of my computers, I had to try three times last night to get a comment past Jerry's "Sign In With Google" gatekeeper. That was oddly persistent but not impossible (and hardly a speedbump to most spammers), so I'd try about four times in the future before giving up...if you have been giving up on the second failure or so to accept your online legitimacy, that is!
Patti and Todd, please know that I dearly love you both, even if my Google gatekeeper doesn't. Since I am a total computer Luddite, I have no idea how to fix the problem for you. **sigh**
Blogger/Blogspot has its games with us!
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