What He's Poised to Do: Stories

by Ben Greenman

Ben Greenman is a writer of virtuosic range and uncanny emotional insight. As Darin Strauss has noted, "Like Bruno Schulz, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and no one else I can think of, Greenman has the power to be whimsical without resorting to whimsy." The stories in this new collection, What He's Poised to Do, showcase his wide range, yet are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word.
From a portrait of an unfaithful man contemplating his own free will to the saga of a young Cuban man's quixotic devotion to a woman he may never have met; and from a nineteenth-century weapons inventor's letter to his young daughter to an aging man's wistful memory of a summer love affair in a law office; each of these stories demonstrates Greenman's maturity as a chronicler of romantic angst both contemporary and timeless, and as an explorer of the ways our yearning for connection informs our selves and our souls.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker whose short fiction, journalism, and essays have appeared there, The New York Times, McSweeneys, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All Story. He is the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Superworse, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both, Correspondences, and the novel Please Step Back. HIs new book of stories What He's Poised To Do: Stories was published in June of 2010.

Reviews

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zigga zagga!

I struggled to begin this review. I couldn’t think of any good openers. Something light, a little fun and funny. I think of it as the glass from which the review may breathe. But I couldn’t, so I’ll just start.

Form, baby! Compact tidy sentences. Readers who enjoy playing the Gertrude Stein zither and the Hemmingway melodic will find these Greenman sonatas foot-tappingly tuneful. This is what you get when you bet small, fight welterweight, a nice crispness, very friendly and melodious. For long stretches he doesn’t describe anything visual at all. Honoree of the Tell’m don’t Show’m Club.

That Greenman can turn on his heel is what impresses me most. The first couple of stories had an Americana, Wells Towers tone to them. But then he starts up that Jim Shepard shit and writes about some eclectic crap, then he turns weird, Marcus-like weird. Versatility, very impressive.

However, howev’. He’s the thing: Like Jim Shepard, ol Greeny treats love as both means and end. Greenman says in the P.S. section “Gotta be a love story. They won’t give a darn toot otherwise. The public wants to see mirrors more than windows.” My words, not his. I heard Karen Fowler talk and she echoed the same sentiment: “Ummmmm, I mean, I would.” My words, not hers.

Does every story have to use love as a means? I feel as though I could care about people without their having to be a husband/wife or parent/child/sibling. Inversely you could have a character have a husband without that being what the story is about. But for storytelling, it’s motivation without needing motivation. Love is unquestionable and bypassed any security checks. “He’s in love, let him do whatever he wants.” To write about it (as subject) is one thing, to use it as a vehicle to explore topics the writer interested in, eh, I don’t know, seems easy is all I’m saying.

(I don’t want you to think I got some cat-o-nine tails to lash here. I love love as much as the next human. That’s why I’d like to see it unburdened of all these fetters and burdens that aren’t its responsibility. I don’t think love is the answer to that many questions and therefore it can go back to being just love.)

In the Symposium, Socrates warns that love is always wanting more love, that it’s by nature insecure and afraid it might lose what it has/is. I think the characters in these stories lives are written in such script. Most of them are losers. Love didn’t really help them all that much in the end.

Now, who’s going to give me some likes??!?!?

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is a divorce on the moon different from any other divorce? Maybe not, but having the kids on the weekends gets a little more complicated when you move back to Earth. Greenman takes on human relationships from so many different angles in this collection of 14 stories (all inspired by, or, in some way related to, letters or letter-writing). Desire, betrayal, dependency... You name it. And he shifts effortlessly between genders, planets, races, and emotions. I put the book down feeling wistful and melancholic.
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WORDS I LEARNED WHILE READING
soupçon | sybarite | flibbertigibbet

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of these stories aspire to being meaningful but fall short. The common threads holding the collection together are letters and relationships, but nothing really new or significant is uncovered through these similarities. Because the stories are, for the most part, told through letters, they act as snapshots of a person or a relationship at a given moment in time. This is an interesting concept, and it is somewhat impressive how Greenman can tell an entire story through a letter that one character is writing. But the stories don't seem to go anywhere, and the despair the characters feel in their relationships feels trite and unoriginal. This also means that Greenman's wandering, flashback-y narrative style can be a bit of a chore to get through.

"Seventeen Different Ways to Get A Load of That" was the highlight for me. The odd futuristic setting that doesn't affect the story all that much was a nice touch, implying that for all our technological advances, our fundamental human experience hasn't changed much. As Greenman mentions in the conversation following the collection of stories: "We have put people on the moon. We have split the atom. So why have we made so little progress in understanding how men and women deal with each other: the want, the wait, the hope, the hurt, and so forth?" Out of all the works here, this story best captures the effect that a crumbled relationship can have on a person, and how strongly the mind can hang onto something that is no longer there. "Down A Pound" was another enjoyable (and also depressing) story of a woman's inability to keep from over-analyzing her relationships and things that make her happy, to the point that the analysis gets in the way of her actual happiness.

These two stories make this collection decent, but there is unfortunately not much else here worth reading.

[Roozbeh Daneshvar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found these stories about human connection and those who either don't get it, or those who just pretend that they don't get it. After reading a couple of short stories I realized the subtle humor. e.g. the following two quotes:

Tomas passed through a period of extreme exhaustion, though he was still a young man. “I am passing through a period of extreme exhaustion, though I am still a young man,” he wrote to Rodriguez.

“Yamila, my darling, my love, I will write you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day on into eternity.” He did.

This was one of the books that I enjoyed so much that I kept looking at the remaining to see how much more is left. I am bringing a few quotes below:

‘You have hope,’ she said, and I agreed, saying ‘yes’ and then saying nothing. I have hope, but I am unsure whether I am to act on it or not. If I act, there is the possibility of gain but a greater possibility of loss. The sweetness of hope will last only until I take action, at which point it will vanish.

Nine months later, you were born and your mother died. I do not know a more elegant way to describe this turn of events. My sorrow raised you. I hope that it did not poison you.

In my vision, my mother was there, standing forlornly in a corner of the front lawn, and I suddenly came over with an idea. Since I could no longer write letters to Jill, and since I could no longer speak to my mother on the phone, I would write letters to my mother.

“These aren’t wartime conditions,” Sophie said. “And yet we are not at peace,” her mother said, with the mixture of twinkling irony and dead seriousness that Sophie recognized as a sign of pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous—or, as she preferred to call it, of intelligence.

“How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?”

he announced to his father that he would not marry Priyadarshini. The family refused to recognize Gonvindan’s refusal.

Your failure to understand human cruelty is one of the most worthy things about you.

Your head is in the clouds, as they say, and clouds are in your head. Down here on the ground, we live not by ideas but by impulses and consequences.

“Opportunities will not represent themselves unless they are re-created and re-produced, and by that time they are less opportunities than products that carry the sense of opportunity”

I murmured something about getting an education, he cleared his throat to take me off it. “The files are history, but what’s history? Merely markers of time that can’t be recovered.” This was, I would come to learn, his dominant mode, a grave melancholy that he intended as philosophy but was in fact autobiography.

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

If a joke failed to find its mark, as it often did, she would tell me flatly why it was unfunny. “I’m assertive, not aggressive,” she told me. “One is about protecting your own space; the other is about moving into someone else’s.” I accepted the definitions but not the diagnosis.

We were happily inseparable, bound as much by what wasn’t happening as by what was.

I thought about what she had said, and for a few minutes it seemed true. But then parts of it started to shimmer, like a mirage, and I wasn’t as certain anymore. The part about connecting to the common humanity in us all had a certain appeal, but the part about rejecting the temptation of that dumb mix of empathy and superiority bothered me. Isn’t that where much art comes from? You feel the pain, it starts to drive you to your knees, you bring yourself back up by telling yourself you don’t belong down in the pain, you move forward on this cushion of temporary superiority, and then you use the energy generated by this process to create something. In fact, after a few times, you come to value the sadness, to receive it with a kind of joy, because you know that it will, in time, bring you to creative work.

[Radu Stochita]

After reading over half of the book, I was wondering why did I keep on coming back to it? I felt that I got the sense of it, what the author was going for and the feelings it was arousing in me were just repeating themselves story after story.
It is not a discouraging review, but rather a personal note on my relationship to the book which I imagined to pick up after work or during work, but during the breaks I often take from work because of the heat that makes it impossible for me to work, and transpose my mind in a fast-paced imaginary world. If I read this book in winter, it would have been different, I am sure, but during the summer, when the time calls for car chases and elevated emotions, the book offers rather space for reflection, self-inquiry and empathy with the characters that find themselves in situations we, in our Protestant logic, would deem as irrational.
Try being in love and acting with reason. I wonder who can.

[Reemawi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this collection are right up my alley, in the sense that they focus on the interactions between people, particularly between men and women, and not necessarily in a romantic context. The writing is obviously of a high caliber and certainly not mainstream. The fact that the writer, Ben Greenman, is an editor at The New Yorker is very evident throughout, not to say that that is what makes the writing good, or the stories good, but it definitely has a New Yorker fiction feel to it all.

I did not like all the stories, but there were a few that were excellent. My personal favorites were: story #13 in the collection of 14, "What we Believe but Cannot Praise"; "Seven Different Ways to Get a Load of That"; "To Kill the Pink". The stories are as different from each other as can be, so much so that I found myself forgetting that all of them were written by the same person. However, they do share one common theme, which is stated on the jacket and expressed by the author himself in the P.S. section of the book: human connection. All the characters in each of the stories long for a connection; whether it be romantic or otherwise, a connection is what they're after, and that's what I love the most about it all.

I enjoyed this read.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Greenman takes on many voices in this collection: men, women, African-American, contemporary, and from another century. But, I found few of them compelling or believable. Each story is postmarked with a place and year, and each contains some element of the epistolary. The stories (per the "P.S." notes at the end of the book) are mostly about the disconnection of communication between men and women, which is true, and is best achieved, I felt, in the story From the Front (North Africa, 1851), where a soldier/father writes his annual birthday letter to his daughter, whom he evidently cannot bear to have a real relationship with because her mother died in childbirth, and because he has been dispatched away with his military company. However, in the letter we get, he squanders most of his pages bemoaning his questionable captain and complaining of their professional relationship. He closes the letter with a brief address of the history between him and his wife, and an apology to his daughter for the scant communication. What more can he say of their connection?

[Alana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad...in a sticky, can't-get-rid-of-it way. Because of that, the unending stories that are just sad, I wavered between an "OK" and truly liking it. But, I think he's so much smarter than all the rest of us, so he gets the 3 stars.

[Iamily Lopez · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading the book the song That’s all I ask by Nina Simone would always pop into my head. I think it really captures the yearning that the characters feel.
Personally I thought it was comforting to read because it explores such raw and forbidden emotions that is hardly explored without judgement or shame.

In the end, it reminded me of my favorite quote by Sylvia Plath.

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end”

Overall it enacts the essential human struggle between self-realization and self-protection.

[Amna Shariff · Rating 3 out of 5]

These short stories were lackluster in some areas and made me think if I were in a relationship such as some within the book, I rather kill myself. The longer stories were definitely a high point of this collection.

[Coleman Bigelow · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like a 3.8. some great stories, some head-scratchers.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Over the course of the year, Samantha and I had courted, had promised ourselves to one another, and, formalities dispensed with, had proceeded to investigate one another carnally in a rather rapacious manner” (32).
“I was powerless to think of anything but what she was showing me, and yet I thought mainly of her mother, Edith, who was that moment sitting in her drawing room in London, innocently considering the recent declaration of Malta as a British dominion, entirely unaware of the fact that I was accessioning her daughter” (33).
“ I would tell customers, ‘Do not direct your anger toward me. Speak to me, but let your anger flow toward the menu’” (41).
“Only a single sous chef shed a tear for me” (42).
"The condition of his mustache attested to the extreme nature of his evening" (56).
“I remember remarking to another captain that if I had a daughter I would not object if she ended up arranged compromisingly on Delvigne’s divan” (57).
“From the air, the house looked like a joke told by someone with no sense of timing, a big brown rectangle in the middle of a slightly bigger green rectangle tatted with a white picket fence. The fence looked flimsy because the fence was flimsy. A child could knock it down, and did, several times, mostly as a result of trying to hurdle it and failing, sometimes just for spite” (63).
“She is removing herself from the equation even when she is the subject of the sentence. She hits herself with a nun’s ruler, mentally” (83).
“The family refused to recognize Gonvindan’s refusal” (96).
“Your question is a hard one, which is why I am making no attempt to answer it” (98).
“Your head is in the clouds, as they say, and clouds are in your head. Down here on the ground, we live not by ideas but by impulses and consequences” (98).
“Can I trouble you for a few Karmic Boomerangs?” (98).
“…a man with a maimed hand who looked at the girl with a rude hunger that left no doubt as to the eventual destination of the hand” (102).
“That’s how breakfasts went. I always brought a book or a paper. You liked to start the day making sense of the world with your eyes” (126)
“I went to the library, then I went to a liquor store—both intoxicants, neither lasting” (133).
“On the plane I will cry because I have doubts, and then I will take the s off and have doubt” (134).
“His gaze went to the window, though he had a way of giving you to understand that he was looking at the pane of glass rather than through it” (142).
“ ‘Did you know that after sports championships are played, the shirts announcing the victory of the losing team, which have of course already been printed, are shipped to Africa? It’s like there’s an alternative reality there.’
‘Or here,’ Schiff said” (143).

[Ethel Rohan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book. I really did. Readers, editors and fellow writers, all of whom I respect and admire, raved about this book. I expected to feel the same way. I'm afraid I didn't.

I attended Ben Greenman's reading, and his excellent conversation with Oscar Villalon, here in San Francisco's fabulous City Lights bookstore. He wowed me. I found him intelligent, articulate, earnest, tender, and, yes, sexy.

I loved Greenman's passion for the dying art of letter writing and his concerns about isolation and what's lost versus gained on the human levels through technology and the internet etc.

I hurried home with Greenman's book and dived right in. Only I belly-flopped. I couldn't get into the stories. They felt strangely inaccessible to me. I couldn't connect with the characters and didn't feel moved by their struggles and dilemmas. There was too much remove for me between the stories and the storyteller/narrator. Thus as much as I admired the skill, language, craft and scenarios in many of these stories, they left me numb. For me, they failed on the level of characterization and empathy.

Perhaps the failing is all mine. That's more than possible. Perhaps I'll come back to the collection down the road and give it another read. That's how much I want to like the stories as much as I did the man.

[Andy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of short stories by Ben Greenman. He explores different forms of stories and different types of plots-For example, one story is about a seemingly typical family relationship tension except that it occurs mainly on the moon. The thing is that it is not really a science fiction story and I found that it ultimately fell short as both a "family relationship story" and as a science fiction story.

On the other hand, there were some great stories. My favorite was "What We Believe We Can Not Praise". a 50 something man returns to his hometown to take care of some family business and inadverently drives by a law office where he worked for a summer while in college. The story flashes back to that summer, the two lawyers who headed the firm and a fellow intern who the narrator falls for. I felt as I knew all the characters, was living in that time and suddenly was jolted to the present day where the narrator runs into his old flame on a train 30 years later and thousands of miles away from their hometown. A great story.

So this was an uneven collection, and I suspect that different readers may be attracted to different stories--making this an interesting and worthwhile book to read

[Stasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing like being sick and mostly couchbound to make you devour a book, eh? When I started reading this earlier today, I thought I was just going to blow through it because I didn't think I'd like it: the two first stories were that kind of modern, detached sort of voice that makes you hopeless about anything you can do, ever. I hate that, especially when it's applied to love, or really human emotions in general. I like to think there IS happiness in the world, even between men and women in relationships.

But as I kept reading, I realized not all the stories were like that. In fact, I really liked them. They're really well-written, clever, and all feel different and interesting. I feel a little bad that I read it so quickly, since I think most of the stories deserved more digestion than that. But oh well, not much else to do when you're sick;)

[Risa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are a mushy romantic (as I am) then several of these stories will make your blood curdle. Greenman's perspective is a long way from "Love Conquers All". Nonetheless, he is a talented writer who takes on a wide range of narrative voices, and succeeds more often than he misses. The thematic tie that binds the disparate settings and voices together is the idea of correspondence, which certainly got me thinking about how the current penchant for tweeting and Facebook updating is going to change the way lovers and friends relate to one another and how relationships develop, or don't. Of course, as this collection demonstrates, a more detailed mode of correspondence is no guarantee of understanding, nor certainly of happiness. It does, however, offer an opportunity for greater revelation and insight, and, in the best of circumstances, a deeper Truth.

[Kaela · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually don't read short stories because I tend to crave more from them, but with these stories I didn't feel a connection with any of the characters. I think the author was trying to make a connection between love and relationships, his writing was beautiful at times but jumbled at others, as if he was really trying to get artsy with his words. I also don't like when the narrator of the story addresses the reader as if they are a part of the story. I don't want to feel like one of the characters - I want to read about someone else!

[Sandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read short stories and this reminded me why. Though these are well written and intriguing, short stories seem to leave me unsatisfied. I want more. I just start to relate to the characters and they are gone! I just kept thinking I would like a book about the characters in the story - each one was an exploration of relationships (usually male/female) and I wanted to go further.

[Darlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is one of the most honest portrayals of love -in all it's forms- that I've ever read. There are so many degree of love and forms that it comes in, and each story examines a different angle of it. Together this collection may not leave you feeling warm and mushy like The Notebook, but it does offer a you an opportunity to better understand people, their motivations, and struggles on one of the most complicated things in life

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never been a fan of short stories but this is an exception. Every story involves letters of some kind, either the story is written as a letter or letters feature prominently. They're also each set in a very specific place and time -- Florida in 2010, New York in 1964, Algeria in 1896 etc, and somehow Greenman is able to take on the personalities and voices of a very diverse array of narrators. Excellent and quick read.

[Clay Cassells · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Lisa could have been a summer fling, but she was not a summer fling. Her center of gravity was too low. It was wrong of me to hope for her, because my life was loaded up, and she was not the thing that would, if added, make it lighter." - from 'What We Believe but Cannot Praise,' one of many transcendent moments in Greenman's collection. Beautiful, sad stories, keenly observed and precisely rendered. Greenman is really good.

[Nicolai · Rating 4 out of 5]

good stuff, very well-crafted and moving, altho sometimes gimmicky and a little samey. Suppose it's not fair to blame the book for being about relationships since it is a book inspired by corrspondences, but they're all romantic relationships and you have to wonder if Greenman couldn't have tried his very skilled hand at different types of relationships.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Largely well-done, occasionally uneven treatment of the minutiae of relationships and the discrete moments that define how we think about those relationships.

The downside, for me, is that the author is so focused on the negative space of the subject that the book has a bit of a 'piling on' effect and few, if any, of the stories offer much in the way of denouement.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly ambitious little book. Full of sadness & beauty, these stories are built around letters -- written from lover to lover, sister to brother, the dead to the living. Comprising everything from science fiction to bad-love stories, this book is everything that, say, the works of Denis Johnson are not: humane, sharp, and actually well-written.

[Edwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok. Greenman is definitely skilled and I did find resonance in a handful of these stories. I think it may just be that his style did not appeal to me, which seemed a bit old fashioned. The language was often not very economic. In some cases, it matched the setting of the stories/letters very well, but still, across the board, I found him to be overly wordy.

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

What He's Poised to Do is a collection of short stories, or letters, that various characters write, focused on common themes of love and loss.

I didn't find it particularly moving or exciting. None of the stories are particularly memorable, nor did I connect with any particular character.

An okay read, but not a collection of stories that I'd read again.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd give this title 2.5 stars. It's a quick read and the stories are pretty short all intertwined on the themes of love, sex, infidelity and such. The stories I liked best were "Barn" and "Kill the Pink." The others didn't resonate for me as much.

[Ernie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opener and title story is not this book's best. "What We Believe But Cannot Praise" towards the end, finally redeems it, but barely. Somehow the rhythm and flavor of this book makes me envy the illiterate a little.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a very enjoyable read. While some of the stories were not of great interest, generally speaking the way that Greenman writes about the complexities of relationships (of all sorts) is very rich.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of beautifully written short stories mostly dealing with relationships between men and women, some romantic, some family, some something else. Ben Greenman is an editor for the New Yorker and he writes very well, each story and character having its own distinct, strong voice.