Happy Thanksgiving, All

                                Happy Thanksgiving. Kevin turns 18 on Saturday.  

                            This was from the time when he didn't have a phone in his hand.
                            Have a good day everyone and thanks for the ecard, Jeff and Jackie.
 

Short Story Wednesday :THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS

 

I remember buying this on the upper west side at the urging of a friend and that was well over a decade ago. I have read the occasional one-most of them are a page or two-and being somewhat stymied by them. The critics love her.  The writing is not gorgeous enough to function as poetry and there's not enough narrative to be a true story.

“A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that 'The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis' will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker.

"The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall" tells the story of the horrible smell cause by the cats occupying a prison hall and how it was dealt with. Just a few pages long and you may or may not find it entertaining. Most of the stories are like this. I think Jeff M is a fan. I will keep reading. 

They are not so different than the prose section of a haibun. Maybe I need to think of them like that. 

George Kelley

Todd Mason

Monday, Monday

 

SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE was a terrific movie-so true to the book, so well-acted however I found it very hard to follow the Irish dialogue. Should have waited for the closed captions on TV, I guess. Watching the new Ted Danson show, which does not have the heft of THE GOOD PLACE and the setting is pretty depressing but it is still well done. I wish I liked SILO more and I wish I had the focus for SAY NOTHING. So I have been watching a lot of documentaries on you tube and Kanopy. 

Go Lions!

Just started the new Charles Baxter novel (BLOOD TEST) and am reading Stanley Tucci's WHAT I ATE FOR A YEAR. 

Trying to shake the depression of the election. Just one decent appointment might help. One reason to think a democracy will survive. Can we throw it all away after three hundred years?

Hoping you have a good Thanksgiving. What's new? Love you all!

FFB: RIDERS ON THE STORM, Ed Gorman

 

Ed Gorman, Riders on the Storm (reviewed by Ron Scheer)

Ed Gorman’s new Sam McCain mystery is set in 1971 and reflects some of the civil turbulence of those Vietnam years as they wash over a small Iowa town. 

Plot. A hawkish Senator is trying to ride a waning tide of patriotic enthusiasm to keep himself in office. But his handpicked candidate for a Congressional seat gets murdered after an altercation with a fellow veteran who has made public his opposition to the war.

That John Kerry-sympathizing vet is quickly suspected of the crime by the new sheriff, and the man’s best friend, McCain, has an uphill battle finding evidence of his innocence.  

Time and tide. Gorman remembers the early 70s well (Janis Joplin is heard on the radio at one point singing “Me and Bobby McGee”). The novel is aptly named for the mournful Doors song, “Riders On the Storm,” which recalls the darkly violent and divided mood of a time marked by the growing national ambivalence about Vietnam. He is also a sharp observer of small-town politics and social distinctions.

The portrayal of women in the novel does much to fix its particular point in social history. Whether wives, lovers, or others, they are mostly untouched by the feminist creeds that came to dominate public discourse about gender roles in the years that followed. Gorman shows them as attractive and sexy, reliant on the men in their lives, homemakers and loving mothers of small children.

Ed Gorman

Two, however, emerge as professional women, one of them McCain’s own girl Friday, bracingly independent and unapologetically resourceful. Another seems able to blend marriage and career, though we don’t learn quite everything a candid review would reveal about her until well after she gets involved in McCain’s attempts to rescue his falsely accused friend.

While Gorman does not necessarily endorse it, there is much of the 1970s indulgence in extramarital sex, booze, and other pastimes that had a generation smugly confident in themselves because they were under 30. But you can feel the earth shifting under McCain’s feet as the 1960s recede into the hazy distance behind him.

Wrapping up. This is an enjoyable novel that has as much fun capturing the time and place of its setting as puzzling over the clues pointing to the solution of the mystery it poses. Whether westerns or crime fiction, you know you’re in good hands with Ed Gorman. I recommend this one.

Riders on the Storm is currently available in print and ebook formats at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Strangers in Town, Three Newly-Discoverred Mysteries by Ross Macdonald.

 (from the archives)

Strangers in Town: Three Newly-discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald, edited by Tom Nolan
(Review by Deb)

Containing three short stories (only one of which was published in Macdonald’s lifetime), written in 1945, 1950, and 1955 respectively, Strangers in Town displays some of the earliest themes, characterizations, plot twists, and motifs that are found in Macdonald’s longer works.  In each one of these stories, we see elements emerge that will be explored more fully in future mysteries, including the development of Macdonald’s series private investigator, Lew Archer.

The first story, Death by Water, was published in 1945 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under Macdonald’s real name, Kenneth Millar.  Written while Millar was serving on a naval vessel in the Pacific Theater of WWII, the story features Lew Archer prototype, p.i. Joe Rogers, who is investigating the drowning death of a wealthy man.  Was it just an unfortunate accident or was he deliberately killed?  And, if the latter, who is the killer?  The man’s younger, wheelchair-bound wife has only a few months to live herself.  The man’s stepson is on a navy ship (much like Millar himself when he wrote this story) and therefore unable to have committed the crime.  How about the dead man’s brother, who struggles to live on a limited income?  And where was the wife’s personal nurse when the death occurred?  Millar manages to pack a lot of suspects and motives into a few pages, but what I found most interesting about the story was the reference to ALS (aka, Lou Gehrig’s disease) just a few years after Gehrig himself succumbed to the condition.

Lew Archer appears in the next story, 1950’s Strangers in Town, where he is hired by a woman to prove that her son did not kill a pretty, secretive young woman who was renting a room in her house.  Archer has to travel to a dusty town in the California desert to investigate this one.  As in much of Macdonald’s longer fiction, the small California community in which the story is set is a character in itself.  What I liked most about the story was the sympathetic and dignified treatment of African-American and Hispanic characters (the victim and the alleged killer are both black; the attorney defending the young man is Mexican-American)—they are depicted neither as caricatures nor noble stoics, but as fully-realized characters with the standard human mix of decency, faults, and failings.

The final story in the collection is 1955’s The Angry Man which features several frequent Macdonald themes:  The mentally-ill and the often callous treatment they receive from law enforcement and society as a whole; wealthy but dysfunctional families; the lengths to which people who have no money will go in order to get it; and the juxtaposition of a character’s surface persona with their inward self.  You can also see Macdonald working on the technical problem of how to have a first-person, non-omniscient narrator receive and communicate information without the story devolving into one long piece of exposition (I think Macdonald handles this type of narrative extremely well in both his short and long fiction).  Neither this story nor Strangers in Town was published in Macdonald’s lifetime.  He decision not to publish these works was not because they did not measure up to his standards but for quite the opposite reason:  He liked what he had written so much that he wanted to expand upon it and develop the material into longer works.

As entertaining as these short stories are, I found the most interesting thing about the book to be its long, informative introduction written by Tom Nolan which quotes extensively from letters Millar/Macdonald wrote to his wife (fellow novelist, Margaret Millar—herself an FFB honoree some time ago) while he was serving in the Navy.  During long, occasionally dangerous, deployments, Millar was able to read extensively from the ship’s library and continue to write fiction and develop his ideas for writing first-person murder-mysteries narrated by the hard-boiled but moral private investigator who ultimately became Lew Archer.

Todd Mason

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple

TracyK 

Monday, Monday

 STILL SICK. But let me know what you are up to. The Paxlovid didn't work for me. Just made me nauseous. Or maybe that's the politics of the country right now.

Short Story Wednesday: "Cranked" Bill Crider

 Hey, guys, I have Covid. I am taking Paxlovid but so far no improvement. Yikes! Probably won't be around the rest of the week. How long does this last George and Tracy who have had this version.

"Cranked, Bill Crider from DAMN NEAR DEAD

"Cranked" was from the first collection of geezer noir from Busted Flush Press. Bill was nominated for an Edgar Award (2007) for it in the best short story category. In "Cranked" we have a meeting of four individuals at a roadside convenience store about to be robbed. Karla has escaped a meth fire and is on the run, Royce and Burl, the two bumbling, giggling robbers, are hopped up on meth, and Lloyd has run away from a hospital while his daughter is getting him a cola. These are four tough characters and yet the story has a lot of humor and grace in it. Few writers can pull off humor and violence (and there is plenty of both) as well as Bill did. Bill went on to write another story about Karla, who he took a liking to. I think you can read both of them on kindle for a few bucks. This first collection was edited by Duane Swierczyncki, who was just starting out then. He did a great job of luring good writers in here.

TracyK 

Jerry House 

George Kelley

Kevin Tipple

Monday, Monday

 I am sick so this will be short. I got my shots so I blame that airplane trip.

Liked CONCLAVE very much. Also MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK.

Reading ALL FOURS by Miranda July. I am sure I am watching TV but I can't think of what.

How about you?  Wait: THE DIPLOMAT, THE LINCOLN LAWYER. And a great little movie on AMAZON PRIME, LIMBO set in the outback.

FFB PLAINSONG, Kent Haruf

 

 

This is the second time I have read this novel and it's just a brilliant book. Perhaps most of the characters are too black or too white but it didn't bother me. It concerns a teacher, his two young sons, his mentally ill wife, a pregnant teenager, the two elderly men who take her in, and a bully and his bully family. One chapter is about an elderly woman teaching the two boys (nine and ten) how to bake oatmeal cookies and I could read it over and over. Haruf went onto write more novels about this town in Colorado. His last novel OUR SOULS AT NIGHT was published a year after his death in 2014. Funny how many of my favorite writers write about small town life in the Midwest and West.

Short Story Wednesday: "The Best of Everything" Richard Yates

 (from the archives)

Richard Yates wrote two of my favorite novels, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and THE EASTER PARADE, but he also wrote this fabulous collection of ten short stories (among others). Written in the fifties "The Best of Everything" almost seems like a story written earlier. Were people in their twenties this naive? This innocent? I have to assume some were.

It is the story of a couple on the day before their marriage is to take place in Atlantic City. The point of view switches between the two of them and you can't help but notice how drastically different they are from each other once you are in their heads. You also realize they don't know each other at all and that their marriage will probably fail quickly. 

The woman is a typical middle class young woman working as a secretary. She speaks well and is respected in her office. The man is a step or two down the socioeconomic ladder and has a poor grasp of English, which the woman's roommate makes her constantly aware of, calling he and his friends, "Ratty little clerks." 

But for whatever reason, Grace goes forward with the marriage plans although we sense her worry. Her roommate, feeling badly about the things she has said about Eddie, leaves her alone the night before the wedding and Grace plans an early consummation, feeling this will set things right.

But Eddie has been the man of the hour with his friends at a bachelor party and he is stunned by their good will. You get the feeling he has never been the center of attention before this night. He hurries to Grace's apartment to tell her he is going back to the party and her attempt to seduce him goes to naught.

We understand now that Eddie will always choose his friends over his wife and that will destroy their marriage quickly. She goes so far to put his hand on her naked breast. Nothing.

There is a lot of discussion online about this story. One teacher said it was the cause of a female student in his class dumping her boyfriend. Yates' real gift here is capturing the mind and language of both characters so clearly and with sympathy. Eddie is not a bad man and Grace is not a snob, but they certainly don't belong together. They seem to have reached an age when they believe it is time to marry no matter to whom. 

 

George Kelley 

TracyK 

Kevin Tipple 

Todd Mason

Monday, Monday

 What are you guys up to?