All I Can Truly Deliver

by Matt Vadnais

What I love most about each of these enigmatic, glistery, beautiful, and intricately inventive stories is their valuable celebration of and commitment to the Difficult Imagination. Comprised of skewed appropriations and manipulations of "canonical" work by the likes of Melville, Kafka, and Joyce, this collection reminds us again and again of two profound points: that "originality" and "truth" are, at best, states of mind, and that loss and death remain the only two things we'll never really be able to deconstruct. All I Can Truly Deliver marks the arrival of an important new talent to the festival called exploratory fiction. -- Lance Olsen There is the world and then there is the world. In his "Cover Stories" Matt Vadnais uncovers the paradox of "realistic" fiction. One need not go out and bring 'em back alive when one has the more real and inventive terrain of the library. Write what you know goes the verisimilitude saw, and All I Can Truly Deliver knows what it know. These stories are maps more detailed than the merely real things they represent. --Michael Martone In his deeply imagined, skilfully crafted first collection, Matt Vadnais demonstrates the vitality of the fiction canon as well as the versatility, the possibility, that fiction can achieve in the 21st century. -- Mary Clearman Blew

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

Reviews

[Paul Cockeram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matt Vadnais takes the concept of a cover song, where one musician sings the hit of another, and applies it to short stories, with intriguing and productive results. What especially grabs me about cover stories is the gap between the original and the new version. Vadnais’ collection “All I Can Truly Deliver” repays careful contemplation of the gap between a cover and the original, illustrating how it works the same way as the gap between one sentence and the next, or one word and another: where listening happens, and where the most important meaning resides. As Vadnais points out in the collection’s concluding essay, a good cover does more than recapture what was excellent about the original—it both remakes the original in its own image and critiques or evaluates the original in light of the distance between them. (His example of Sissy Bar covering Snoop Doggy Dogg’s line “Got bitches in the living room” by turning it “into a pretty, harmonious duet sung by two women” illustrates the point.) This is why Vadnais admires “the cover’s ability to make meaning in simultaneous ways by conjoining the roles of listener and artist.”

Perhaps this is also why so many of the collection’s stories seem to be listening to the plots of the original stories they are covering rather than straightforwardly reporting them. The novella “Real-Time Video of Dead People You Want to Have Coffee With” in particular develops major plot points, and passes weeks or months, between one sentence and the next. Several narrative events and background points are not dramatized, but made clear only by the narrator’s somewhat dry response to them. The effect was to emphasize the story’s ongoing theoretical discussion about ghosts, memory, and the uneasy relationship between history and fiction, while de-emphasizing the emotional connections between readers and characters. Four of the collection’s other stories had a similar emphasis, to varying degrees.

The major exception was collection’s first story, “The Great Wall,” which balanced a full-throated theoretical discourse with a heartfelt drama of grief in the person of its narrator, a college professor mourning his wife. That made this story the collection’s most “traditional,” and for my money the strongest—that rare cover that says something smart in a catchy, crowd-pleasing way. The other stories were certainly worth the price of admission, but they rarely grabbed me so fiercely, nor left an image as memorable and heartbreaking as the one closing “The Great Wall.”