One of the best things an author can do for you is to leave you with an image that you'll never forget. Short stories do this for me more than novels, I think. From novels, I mostly take away characters, or a general feeling of the novel's place or a memory of its stylistic affect. From poems, when I read them (which I try not to) I am sometimes left with a memorable line or even a word. Short stories, though, deliver a single frame -- like the ranting in the doctor's office waiting room from Flannery O'Connor. The bent translucent form over the candle from Melville. The throbbing floorboards from Poe. Recently I remember remembering the one-armed man in the tree, pruning it with a chainsaw, from Karen Brennan. (Of course there are those memorable moments I'd rather scrape from my brain, like every scene in any movie that helpfully features a person being burned alive. Thanks Hollywood!)

From Brian Evenson's collection, The Wavering Knife, I am left with a residue of images I have never seen before, and that's saying something small, but significant.

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The other half (and I don't mean exactly 50 percent, but *some*) present a lighter, more ridiculous fare. The latter and lighter group are about silly men and the dumb things they do and say -- from the Promisekeeper group that meets in a bar to the guy who tries to set up a church in Walmart, to the pair of redneck gravediggers who have so much trouble getting their corpse into a shallow hole in hard packed dirt that they chop him up, pee on him, eviscerate him, stomp on him, and eventually throw what's left of him into a ravine and pretend to cover up the grave. What happens next? The family and minister come over the hill, with the coffin he was supposed to go in, asking to "dig up" the body. These stories, though smart and wry, are not my cup of irony. The other half of the book, however, is priceless. Evenson's great accomplishment, his genius, lies in these other stories: "The Ex-Father," "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette," "The Wavering Knife," "Virtual," "One Over Twelve," "The Progenitor," and my favorite, though it isn't the showiest story in the book, "House Rules." "House Rules" affected me the most, though it is quiet and drab, and the image of the velvet rope across the stairway will stick with me for sure.

Maybe these stories are evolved Kafka, or maybe they're perfect scifi. This is a fiery imagination kept rigidly contained in exacting boxes, let out in discreet units, each one perfect and with a strange serenity. These stories take you in utterly, and then truly reward you, like magic tricks that really work. I can't really give you any plot nuggets or summaries for these, because they don't work except in their own context, provided by the stern, rigorous language and the limitations of the prose. They're so strange and explosive in the ideas that drive them that they need Evenson's specific containers to make them conceivable. Story after story I would finish and then say, "That was so WEIRD. And FABULOUS." Then I'd hungrily go on to the next.

It's not surrealism -- everything is true within its own law. It's maybe alterealism. Whatever it is, it was enormously engaging and challenging to read and halfway through I was already thinking in my head of people I know who would love a book like this. Definitely read it. A small black rendering on a blank tablet, of something truly different, is more intriguing than a dense and colorful mural, six blocks long, of something we already know.

I met Evenson a long time ago at a conference in Denver, and I can't remember much about that conference, including meeting Evenson, except that I know I did and that he had kind of a wild aspect. He looked more like the book jacket photo on The Wavering Knife than he did this photo here, but I'll include this more respectable one since he's now the Director of the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

Labels: books, brian evenson, contemporary, short stories

OKAY.

On to a collection of short stories.

Karen Brennan wrote several books before this one, notably Wild Desire back in 1990 which was positively reviewed in the NYT Review of Books. Now she's a professor at the University of Utah. She's written five books, total, and she teaches the graduate level poetry workshop at U of U. I'm 100 pages into this book and there's not much left, about half as much again, I'd say. It's what they used to call a slim volume, back when they said that sort of thing. There are a few things I have to say, at this point...

1. This writing is very controlled, very lovely, very fine. There isn't a lot of warbling excess -- it's carefully honed. It reads like poetry, lots of it, and I'm not surprised to find that she's also a poet. Reading these very short short stories, where often what's central is an image, or a situation, or an idea, and not a plot exactly, I'm thinking of this analogy: Handling good writing, like this, good images and interesting phrases and bright language, is like handling a lap full of sparkly jewels. It's pleasurable. Maybe poems are like the loose jewels, unset, just rolling around. Maybe short stories are like the jewels strung onto a wire, that you can wear, but with no interstitial weave or anything, just a sequencing. Maybe novels (I could be wrong, maybe they are nothing like this) are like a beaded garment, where you not only have the pretty gems, but you have to arrange them over a space, and it can't be too crowded or too sparse, and you have to also create the fabric between them, and make sure that fits, and that the seams are hidden. These stories, while all beautiful in themselves, are not connecting together to make anything wearable. I carry them off in my memory as separate things. It's really hard to write a novel. This writing, here in this book, is gifted and at times genius, but I don't think it was *hard* to write this. That's not a criticism, it's just the way the book feels.

2. It's not a good idea, in my opinion, to have a lot of first person stories in a row, all sounding alike. They started to bleed together in my mind, and I felt when I started the next story that I was still reading about the last character. I liked the third person stories best, I think, because the narrators of the others failed to differentiate themselves. I think my favorite was the one in three sections about the wreckage, the face, and the... sleeping. That was very well woven. My least favorite were the most fragmentary ones in first person. I also very much liked the one about the beautiful woman who maims her hand with a chainsaw accidentally. That one I will remember.

3. I was already struck with an example of why I don't usually read contemporary fiction. After reading this book, so rich in the image department, I was outside watering flowers with my little daughter. She had the hose in her hand, looking very picturesque with the little cotton dress and the flowers and her wavy hair. I was just loving watching her and I kept smelling something awful and rotten, and eventually I looked around carefully and there were two dead baby birds under the tree. Baby birds that fell out of the nest and died and there was nothing anyone could do. And my first thought, all seeped in this kind of literary brainjuice was, 'I should write a short story and use that.' Which, of course, wouldn't be altogether BAD. But the right thing to do, if I do use it, would be to work it into my novel... or just think about it and let it filter in. Or blog it. When I was in grad school I used to keep running lists of these "things" you know, what I would call jewels using my analogy above, and when the list got long enough I'd write a story using all of them, forcing them all in together like a salad.

4. Everyone in this book is miserable. Some extremely miserable. It's funny because from the first three pages I thought it was going to be kind of sweet and nice and boring. I think that's why that story is first.

So, on I go to finish and release it. I'm trying to decide whether to email these authors. Seems kind of pushy, like hey, I'm reading your BOOOK pay attention to MEEEE. Heh heh.

Labels: books, contemporary, karen brennan, short stories