The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road: 23 Variations on a Theme

by Susan Stamberg (Editor)

Genres: Short Stories

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Brandon Allers]

BOOK INFO:
Publisher - W.W. Norton
Author - Susan Stamberg
Illustrator - N/A
Page Count - 206
Type - Hardcover
Format - Perfect Binding
Cover - Scene Setter
Title(s) - The Wedding Cake In The Middle Of The Road (23 Variations On A Theme)
Audience - NA 18+, A
Genre - Short Stories, Writing, Wedding



Summary: Author Susan Stamberg assembled a motley collection of veteran and up and coming writers for a challenge involving of all things a wedding cake. So, these writers did what they do best when given artistic license they went to work unboxing, decorating, baking, climbing upon, stealing, melting down, filling with arsenic, and toppling with megalith sized knives clasped in the hands of steady (and not so steady) brides and grooms.
Different in every way but one, whether they were made of plastic, frosting, or cornbread, they all had one thing in coming. The middle of the road. Somehow each matrimonial confection had to end it's life on the road, or on the way to it. This is a book on theme, and anyone looking to see an idea from every angle will never think of wedding cake the same way again.


Pros: The Variety of authors, quick reading, thought provoking.


Cons: lack of symmetry with chapter length.


Recommendation: I recommend this book for our reader/writers, and students of theme.


MY FAVORITE QUOTE: "In the beginning was the girl in the black raincoat."
- George Garrett


**** Anahata = "Unstruck Sound" - Serenity
(You insert yourself among the characters)

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

I wanted so much to like this better. I loved the idea of stories all written on a theme and this is a quirky theme. Perhaps too quirky. There were a couple of gems, however. Pam Houston wrote a wonderful story about a young girl who made up Indian folklore to fit whatever situation she found herself, and she found herself falling in love. I will look for other stories by her. Another was a story by David Leavitt.

Who can claim that our love does not endure, less like flowers than like little stakes with the photographs of flowers, stubborn beneath the soil? Perennial.

I have had his The Indian Clerk on my shelf for some time and wish I'd find a way, finally, to get to it.

[HopeF]

2.5 rounded up.
Like most multi-author short story collections, it was a mix. Unfortunately, the mix had only one or two gems and a larger portion of slag. A third of the stories only included the image prompt as what was clearly an afterthought.

[Karrie]

Interesting premise. I read 5 stories and moved on.

[Abby Epplett]

A collection of short stories based on a prompt from NPR. On the books 30th anniversary, a good third of the stories have not aged well.

[Audrey]

Some pretty solid stories, many that are just okay, and a lot that did not age well (misogyny & racism)

[John Vanderslice]

This is a celebrated ficiton anthology from the early 90s. I decided to read it because one of the stories in it, "Tandolfo the Great" by Richard Bausch, was in a textbook I used this summer for a class I was teaching. I informed my students that the story was originally in an anthology that featured stories that all had to include a wedding cake that somehow ended up in a middle of a road. This, I said, was the "assignment" all the writers were given. Then I remembered that I actually had the book on my shelf at home, picked up years ago from some library sale, but that I'd never actually read the thing. Well, now I have read it, and I'm happy to report that it holds up pretty well. The list of writers included is quite impressive, a veritable pantheon of literary fiction writers from the 90s: Bausch, Ron Carlson, Charles Baxter, Stuart Dybeck, George Garrett, Marita Golden, Pam Houston, Madison Smartt Bell, Joy Wiliams, Ann Beattie, Al Young, Josephine Humphreys, Kelly Cherry, Mary Lee Settle . . . And for the most part they are as good as you expect them to be. This isn't to say every story in the book is a classic--far from it--but there are no clunkers either. And the stories are amazingly different from one another, given the writers were all handed the same premise. I have to admit that the cake in the road is such a peripheral component to a couple of the stories (Golden's, Settle's) that you wonder if the writer didn't simply wedge it in to an already existing piece; but even so the stories themselves are terrific. It's a thrill to go from one story to the next wondering how this next writer is going to get the darn cake into the road. Just as the stories are completely different from one another, so too are the solutiions to this "problem." In only one story does the cake fall off the back of the truck. Other stories exhibit drastically different solutions: a delivery man is attacked by a dog and drops the cake; a couple happen upon a stopped delivery van and steal a slice from the cake inside; an infatuated man forms an cake snow sculpture in the middle of a western trail; a photographer sets a cake down in the middle of the road for the sake of taking a particularly engaging shot; a drunken and romantically depressed young man sets a cake down in order to watch it get run over; a mysterious woman in a pickup drops it out of her window as a means to catch the protagonist's attention; beleaguered 19th century German immigrants to Texas set up phony wedding cakes made out of hat boxes, cornmeal mush, and rat poison in order to have something to "properly" celebrate a young couples' nuptuals; and so on . . . Nor is the wedding cake an actual object in all the stories. Indeed, sometimes it's only a metaphor, or an image, or--as in Judith Guest's "Dermot's
Dream"--a vision. In Charles Baxter's delightful "Possum" the wedding cake is simply a lie told by a frustrated older sister to her clueless younger brother. If you can get ahold of this anthology (I'm pretty sure it's out of print), you won't be sorry. It's goofy in concept but quite satisfying in execution. And sometimes the stories rise to true brilliance.

[Emily]

So, I think I'm going to stop reading short story anthologies. I always have such high hopes for them and I am always disappointed by them. Then, inevitably, I am faced with the problem of the physical book itself. They always have at least a couple of brilliant stories in them, but it doesn't seem like enough to justify taking up valuable shelf real estate, especially since I must be realistic and admit that I will never pick the book up again. But on the other hand, I don't want to forget about the couple of gems within . . . though I always do in the end. Alas!

Overall, I wasn't impressed.

[Theresa]

This book is a good follow-up to "The Girl in the Black Raincoat," although in general the stories were somewhat less successful. The image - a wedding cake in the middle of the road - was a bit too offbeat, I think. But a good thought exercise.

[Debra B.]

An interesting concept. I liked it.