Life has gotten in the way of my reading these days. Either I’ve had little to no ability to concentrate or I’ve been so damn exhausted that I’mLife has gotten in the way of my reading these days. Either I’ve had little to no ability to concentrate or I’ve been so damn exhausted that I’m zonked out within a few pages. Neither has anything to do with my choice of writing material or the author’s talent — it’s all me. As someone who tends to read a book per week, on average, this snail’s pace is a bit maddening. As with all things, though, I know this phase will pass and in the meantime, I turn to shorter works for my preferred literary libations.
Whiskey, Etc., Sherrie Flick’s new collection of “short (short) stories,” has proven to be an effective tonic for my current literary malaise. Divided into eight sections (Songs; Pets; Coffee, Tea; Dessert; Art; Cars and Canoes — the strongest section, in my opinion — Soap; and Whiskey), most of these stories are no longer than a few pages; some are only a paragraph, if that. (I’ll admit to having a preference for the longer works in this collection.)
Flick’s sentences are succinct, tight, telling the reader all that’s needed to know ("His divorce settlement reads like an episode of Dallas,"), using food as simile ("Snow covered the ground like a thick milkshake.") and hooking the reader with more memorable opening lines than a frat boy.
"I called the front desk to request a coffeemaker and some of those E-Z packets you can just plop right in, no mess. I was trying to remain on task and organized. “Mr. Smith? We don’t do that kind of shit here,” a woman’s voice purred at me. (from “Learning to Drink Coffee in Idaho”)
"I’m the squash soup. Chopped up and muddled, glowing orange here on the sofa. The soup itself bubbles for real on the stove. But I’m angry, so its simmering seems like a gaping mouth. The soup froths. Me, on the stove." (from “Family Dinner”)
With flash fiction, there’s the assumption that it’s easy to write. Dash off a few sentences, a handful of paragraphs, and a story miraculously appears. But the brevity actually can be deceptive. As Flick accomplishes so successfully with many of the stories in this collection, the reader needs enough details in a brief fragment of time to make a story feel complete while still eliciting the reader’s curiosity about what happens next, or about the backstory that led up to the situation.
"Was it Indiana? Iowa? This was before Rob was gay. Before Christina’s mom couldn’t remember her name. Before I stopped eating. Before James’s last postcard." (from “Road Trip”)
"Lisa leans in to give him a slow, silent, twenty-years-absent hug. He grabs her shoulder and says, “I’m sorry, Lisa. Read about it in the paper. Figured you be here.” …. Back in high school Joe could put together car engines, and later on, in one of those car’s backseats, he could fix a girl so she felt brand new." (from “After”)
In Whiskey, Etc., most of those details and similes involve food and drink, especially coffee. Knowing of Flick’s background as a food writer and essayist, this is almost expected. (A Pittsburgh writer, she teaches in Chatham University’s MFA and Food Studies programs.) More than just a prop, in most cases the coffee or the tofu dinner or the pecan roll is as essential to the story as a main character.
It’s tempting to binge one’s way through these stories, but don’t.
One of my very favorite poems is “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern, born and raised in Pittsburgh and now living in Lambertville, New Jersey. It isOne of my very favorite poems is “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern, born and raised in Pittsburgh and now living in Lambertville, New Jersey. It is somewhat embarrassing for me to have discovered this well-known poem only two years ago – I mean, it was published in 1977 – but discover it I did while spending some time down at the Jersey shore. It found me at exactly the most perfect time, as if he was writing directly to me. I thought about it during our vacation this year and I’ve thought about it several times during the last few weeks.
It’s one of those poems that describes exactly what fellow treasured Pittsburgh poet Toi Derricote means when she says, “Gerald Stern has made an immense contribution to American poetry. His poems are not only great poems, memorable ones, but ones that get into your heart and stay there. ”
How could they not, with lines like these?
“Dear waves, what will you do for me this year? Will you drown out my scream? Will you let me rise through the fog? Will you fill me with that old salt feeling? Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand? Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study the black clouds with the blue holes in them? Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year? Will you still let me draw my sacred figures and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to. Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over again. Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone. Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life. Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.” ~ from “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern
Love that. And words like these are what made me pick up Divine Nothingness, Gerald Stern’s latest collection of poetry, published last November.
At 90, this is Gerald Stern’s seventeenth poetry collection and there is a definite sense of the passage of time. Divided into three simple parts (perhaps to symbolize childhood, adulthood, and the final years of life? or a nod to Pittsburgh itself in “Three Stages in My Hometown,” one of the poems contained within?) Divine Nothingness contains the reflections of a life – the places and people and experiences while growing up in Pittsburgh and then, eventually, living in central New Jersey.
This is the third poetry collection of Gerald Stern’s that I have read and I felt he connected more with his reader (at least this one) much more than in Everything Is Burning (2006) or Save the Last Dance (2008). These poems seem much more accessible.
Although I’m an East Coast girl born and bred (including some time living in central New Jersey for what amounted to less than ten minutes) it’s no surprise that the visages of a Pittsburgh long gone were the ones that came to life for me in these poems.
“…and who and what we were we couldn’t exactly tell for we were covered in soot and hopped away from the heat like hot dancers for we were creating flames for those on the mountain who drove up the steep sides to see the view and took their visitors with them so they could express their gratitude.” (“Hell” Jones & Laughlin)
There are the places of this life (‘so let me take you back to the meadow/ where the sidewalks suddenly become a river …”) and the people (“There was a way I could find out if Ruth/ were still alive but it said nothing about/ her ’46 Mercury nor how the gear shift ruined/ our making love ….”) of particular moments experienced during a time gone by. A segue into an acceptance of life’s finality and the self that is left behind.
“…and, like him – like everybody – I scribble words on the back of envelopes and for that reason and for two others which I’m too considerate to mention I’ll be around when you’re gone.” (from “I’ll Be Around”) ...more
“He’d had a talent for happiness once, though he was young then, and lucky. But wasn’t he lucky now, again?”
Luck was in short supply during F. Scott“He’d had a talent for happiness once, though he was young then, and lucky. But wasn’t he lucky now, again?”
Luck was in short supply during F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final years. Instead, the famous writer best known for The Great Gatsby had an abundance of misfortune and difficulties that are brilliantly rendered in West of Sunset by Pittsburgh author Stewart O’Nan.
“Despite our view of him as a literary giant and dashing Gatsby, Fitzgerald was an outsider–a poor boy from a rich neighborhood, a scholarship kid at private school, a Midwesterner in the East, an Easterner in the West,” writes O’Nan in his essay “The Inspiration Behind West of Sunset” and posted on his website. “I’d thought of him in Hollywood as a legendary figure in a legendary place, yet the more I read, the more he struck me as someone with limited resources trying to hold together a world that’s flying apart, if not gone already. Someone who keeps working and hoping, knowing it might not be enough. And I thought: that’s who you write about.”
Indeed you do.
And with his writing, O’Nan more than succeeds in capturing this aspect of Scott during these last troubled three years. At 40, Scott’s literary success is well in the past and his wife Zelda is institutionalized for psychiatric issues. When Hollywood (finally, thankfully) comes calling with work as a screenwriter, he is emotionally and financially broke, “borrowing against stories he has yet to imagine.” (Love that line!)
Nonetheless, Scott heads west in somewhat desperate hopes of making it once again in a town where everyone else’s star seems to be rising but where his is uncertain. He’d answered California’s call before. (“There were years like phantoms, like fog. Often he wondered if certain memories of his had really taken place.”) Those early Hollywood years and what, exactly, transpired that made Scott so full of self-doubt remain a bit fuzzy to the reader, but that’s all right; West of Sunset stays in 1937-1940.
As the novel progresses, Scott’s own health and emotional well-being becomes more precarious as his battle with alcoholism becomes more prominent. He’s in the midst of an on-again, off-again affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who has her own demons to conquer. And when his passive-aggressive egocentric co-worker isn’t being an editorial pain in the ass, his writing career is beholden to the whimsy of the studio powers-that-be who kill any scintilla of hope and motivation (and the possibility of a credit and continued paycheck) with each cancelled movie. Money is a constant source of uncertainty, and every writer will be able to empathize with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s frustration on his stories being rejected by the popular magazines of the day – most of which adored him once upon a time.
To be sure, West of Sunset has some bright moments. The reader gets to hang out by the pool and at the studio commissary with the likes of Fitzgerald BFF’s Dorothy Parker and Humphrey Bogart – not to mention Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, George Oppenheimer and more than a few others making cameo appearances. Quite a cast of characters, this novel has. If you’re a literary and/or film bub, this one’s for you.
Dust off the Hollywood glitter, though, and there’s something universal about West of Sunset. Anyone who has ever gone through a difficult professional or personal stretch of time (which would be …oh, all of us) will likely find something to identify with in the F. Scott Fitzgerald that Stewart O’Nan presents. West of Sunset is about coming to terms with real and perceived failure, the drumbeat of self-doubt and loathing that accompanies it, the quest for self-redemption, and what happens when our self-reliance runs out. (“Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He’d failed so completely that he’d become his own man again.”)
This is a 5 out of 5 stars novel. I was in love from the first three pages and I feel very confident in saying that West of Sunset – the first Stewart O’Nan book I’ve read – is likely going to be one of my favorite novels of this year....more
As a child of the ’70s and ’80s growing up in Connellsville, PA, a working-class town located 57 miles south of Pittsburgh, Karen’s life is fairlyAs a child of the ’70s and ’80s growing up in Connellsville, PA, a working-class town located 57 miles south of Pittsburgh, Karen’s life is fairly predictable. Both of her parents work different shifts at Anchor Glass, a local bottle factory in town. They’re the proverbial ships passing in the night; their daughters Karen and Linda are latchkey children during an era when such arrangements were not only acceptable but very much the norm.
In March 1985, the Anchor Glass plant was the scene of a mass shooting by a disgruntled former employee who killed several colleagues of Karen’s parents. The incident devastated and shook the town, and although Ms. Dietrich’s parents were not at the plant at the time of the murders, it was certainly a traumatic incident.
A sidenote: the book jacket and promotional copy give the impression that the killings and the aftermath are the focus of this memoir. It is not. In fact, it’s almost downplayed. I’m somewhat perplexed by that, actually; I didn’t live in the Pittsburgh area during that timeframe and I don’t remember any news coverage of this incident – probably because March 1985 was pretty damn traumatic in my own life.
So let’s just leave it at this: I sincerely hope that the murder of four people wasn’t used as a marketing ploy to sell some books.
Because the reality is that The Girl Factory works perfectly fine – and then some – on its own as a coming-of-age memoir about Karen’s relationship with her emotionally cold and ultra-superstitious mother, the changing dynamics of families over time and generations, and the power of unspoken truths on our lives.
“Some stories belong to my mother, if it’s possible to own a story, to carry it inside a small case you wear, perhaps one that fits inside your shoe, invisible to most people. She only takes the stories out of the case for me, not Linda, not my father, not the women she talks to on the phone. Just me. Sometimes, I feel like the stories were written just for me, so that maybe I can carry a small case of my own stories some day, so I will remember the shape of suffering.” (pg. 12)
If Karen needs a reminder of the shape of suffering, all she needs to do is pick up her book. That’s not meant as an insult. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s incredibly well-written (Ms. Dietrich nails the ’80s references, even some that I had forgotten) but the sadness that comes through every page can seem overwhelming. There’s so much lost here, so very, very much.
But so much to gain, on the reader’s part.
I listened to this on audio, which was an excellent choice. Cassandra Campbell is one of the best audiobook narrators (and one of my favorites) and she doesn’t disappoint with The Girl Factory. ...more
Meh. Like others here, and for the same reasons, I'm not entirely sold on this collection. (And this is my first Annie Dillard book, but I plan toMeh. Like others here, and for the same reasons, I'm not entirely sold on this collection. (And this is my first Annie Dillard book, but I plan to read her other work. Probably not my best choice to start with.)
Some of these poems felt like they were over my head. The meaning seemed vague. Maybe those are the ones that are "just jokes," as Ms. Dillard writes in her author's introduction.)
That said, there are some memorable lines and images in these poems.
"So much is wrong, but not my hills." (from "Mornings Like This", which feels so very Pittsburgh-like.)
"Give me time enough in this place/And I will surely make a beautiful thing." ("Mornings Like This")
"Think over what you have accomplished. Was it all that you wished? Has this story been told before?" ("Junior High School English")
"I think of innumerable things; steal out/Westward at sunset, take oar, and row/In the dark or moonlight. In the evening I scribble/A little; all this mixed with reading./ I have a piano, but seldom play./ Books are becoming everything to me." ("From a Letter Home")
"To better my life - don't you think I eagerly desire it? Cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good? Do you think we too shall be at the evening of our life?" ("A Letter to Theo")
And in their entirety, the poems "The Writing Life," (Bring in an eggbeater." "Break apart stones to see if they contain fossils."); "I Am Trying to Get at Something Utterly Heartbroken," and "A Letter to Theo" are probably my favorites. The last two are based on original letters from Vincent van Gogh, letters 1873-1890, edited by I. Stone, translated by Johanna van Gogh.
Loading...
