"Vespa" by Tim Parks

This story can be found in the October 5, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be found at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Mark parked his Vespa beside three others outside Yasmin's school, in Manchester, where it would be safe."

Last Line: "He braked to let it go by, then changed his mind, accelerated, and drove straight on past their house, up the slope beyond the village, then on toward the wooded hills and the horizon."


Really!?

Now, everyone knows I am annoyingly cheerful and supportive of authors’ stories, but this one drove me nuts!  But as I am not a lamabaster by nature, I will limit myself to five points.

1.            The title is just two words about an object in the story, albeit a central object, but without creativity and excitement for the tale at hand.

2.            The writing feels like a well-proofread first or second draft.  I had to check to see who the author was and if he had anything else to his credit warranting a New Yorker placement.  The story does not unfold.  It tumbles and jerks.

3.            The characters are clichés – well-drawn clichés, but still…  Exotic adolescent lover, privileged young man, distant parents in the midst of divorce, something with an engine that gives a young man his freedom (usually a car, but…) the bullheaded police officer… Even down to the female nude model in Mark’s art class.  And why is she even there?  She doesn’t need to be.  Sure, there are connections made to her feelings and Mark’s later, but other methods could have been used.  Or at the very least, this choice could have been more skillful.

4.            The themes are universal.  But here they are forced and tried into a very predictable and clumsy story.  Details abound, but they seem out of sync, heavy, trite.   Even reading the interview with Parks was like listening to a high school English class – adolescence feeling quite brilliant.

5.            I didn’t care about Vespas before reading this story and I care even less now.

 Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/PerthVespa.jpg/220px-PerthVespa.jpg

Alice Munro

 

I am sick today - and all I want to do is read every Alice Munro story I can find in every short story collection I have on my shelves.  "Passion", "Dimensions", "The Office", "Carried Away"...  I am wholly moved in a way that no other author has reached me.  She has kept me company today, moving me away from my own discomfort into a place of compassion for others.  Problems are not neatly tied up with a perfect solution - the endings are necessarily happy, but they are real. 

I needed to convince myself of her future importance to me as a reader, a writer, a woman by reading all the outlying stories before reading a whole collection.  I am convinced beyond measure.  I am stunned by her discernment, her writing craft, and her understanding of the human story.

Photo credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/djHreNp-HvY/maxresdefault.jpg

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

 

This review can also be read in The Canon City Daily Record.

"The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America" by Erik Larson has spent almost 300 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list, since its publication in 2003. "The Devil in the White City" marks its return to bookstores on the heels of the purchase of the rights, by Paramount Pictures. The future film is a joint venture of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese.  1890s Chicago was a time of hubris and innocent excitement. American architects, politicians, and laborers dared to construct a World's Fair that would rival the latest Exposition in Paris. Headed by architect Daniel Burnham, time, talent, and money poured into creating a city unto itself in the Fairgrounds. In this energetic and frenzied environment, Dr. H.H. Holmes was able to lure his victims to his establishment just outside The White City. Young, attractive, and naïve women employed in Holmes's stores did not stay very long. In fact, they were never heard from again. With hints of the old black and whites classics, "Gaslight" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Erik Larson's imagery takes us back in full technicolor. Easy to read details make the past as real as this very moment. With a storyteller's soul, Larson engages us as if we were reading fiction - as if the horrors that occurred so long ago are merely stories, not historical facts.  Minutiae, well-placed, add to the suspense. Many of the items that make up our American lives today began at the Chicago World's Fair. We see the structures, larger than life. We smell the gas jets, beginning to be edged out by newly commercialized electricity. We feel the tension as artistic temperaments clash with economic crises. We hear the angry cries of laborers on strike, demanding a minimum wage and better working conditions. We sense the eerie darkness of odd angles and windowless rooms in a hotel, built only for one purpose. We feel the compelling sadness and frustration of a detective, following sparse leads and his nagging intuition.  There are many names in the book, but Larson masterfully introduces us to each figure, and then uses great skill in reminding us along the way who is important to the story and why. And while the tale is dark and sinister in nature, this book does not read like a horror novel. It is an accessible examination of the juxtaposition between a lofty vision for superior world standing and the desolate madness of a gentlemanly killer. Bouncing back and forth between stories of the Fair's birth and the numberless deaths at the hand of a psychopath, the influence each had on the other remains both disturbing and amazing. Larson weaves the creepy and the fascinating with effective chapter breaks, holding us in a thriller's suspense. Constant action anchors us in each individual story, but with a hindsight afforded only to those of us so far in the future. Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/DWCity.jpg/220px-DWCity.jpg

"The Driver" by Thomas McGuane

This story can be found in the September 28, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be seen on The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Mrs. Quantrill lived in a beautiful old Prairie-style house built in the twenties, which she had restored to its original elegance with Mr. Quantrill, a patent attorney attached to Montana's burgeoning natural-gas industry."

Last Line: "A widow up at Ten Mile went on TV with a hailstone the size of a grapefruit, but subsequent investigation revealed it to be something from her freezer."

I live in a rural town out West and today was “ditch-day”.  I could not curl up with this story, hold it in my hand, and let the print dazzle me.  I had to listen to it on SoundCloud as I traipsed through short, slicing yellow grasses, willing the irrigation water to move further across the orchard.

This rather uninspiring activity allowed me to be more than “wowed” by McGuane’s obvious mastery and skill.  I became consumed.  I found metaphors, themes, connections, imagery, and methodology galore!

Now I know I am an optimist and I like to cheer for almost any story, but there was so much going on in this short piece that I listened twice, and even ignored the ditch for twenty minutes to read it through one time.

Spencer’s silence in school elicits a meeting between his mother, the “tallest person in the room and very thin, with unblinking blue eyes”, the principal, and the struggling boy, himself.  Special ed is the proposed to solution and Mrs. Quantrill responds by insisting that some time in Bavaria will “cure” her son.  

The narrator takes us to their car for the mother’s hen-pecking and elitist soliloquy.  Only when we reach the end of the paragraph do we realize that she has forgotten her son!  She was so wrapped up in her own judgments and thoughts, her own superiority, that she has not even seen her child!  It is here, also, that we discover our narrator is third person omniscient – not limited, as we might have supposed.

In this story, we are introduced to the concept of things not always being what we think they are based on our limited perspectives.  “Subsequent investigation” is often necessary. 

Spencer starts walking, now that he’s alone.  Home?  We don’t now know.  Just that he has decided to walk.  And here we meet “the driver” – at this point, I had forgotten the title and was so wrapped up in the neat little “tricks” McGuane had already employed.  

The interchanges between the driver and the boy further show that things are not always as they appear.  The driver has a schema that is challenged.  He tries to do the right thing.  And there are evidences of “too quick to judge” in the resulting events.

The ending of the story isn’t in the last sentences of the last paragraph.  It is in the last sentences of the first paragraph.  Spencer inherits the house, has it “demolished” and turned into a storage unit facility.  Are things what they appear, even here?  Is the demolition due to an “acting out” of an older, neglected Spencer – or is it an acceptable, adult decision by a man who wants to move on?

Again, I am just enthralled with the craft of this story.  There is so much more here to talk about!  If only there wasn’t a ditch to watch!

Photo credit: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ce/ae/82/ceae82de022219d3f7a466c856375263.jpg 

Authors thank reviewers: Amos Oz

Dear Ms. Cash,

Thank you for your heartwarming words about my story. You do have a very sharp eye for detail.

Warmest regards,

                                                                                             Amos Oz









Photo credit:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Amos_oz675.jpg/200px-Amos_oz675.jpg 

Review can be read here. 

Authors thank reviewers: Mark Haddon

The review can be read here.