Stories from Granta, New Yorker, etc.
- Wagner in the Desert - The male protagonist's single, visiting old friends he's not seen for a while. He worries that his life is shallow - "And of course with each recalibration you think not that you are trading down or betraying your values but that you are becoming more mature"; "I slowly understood what it is to be a man for a certain type of high-strung, successful, and thin woman: you are an avatar of capability, like an living Swiss Army knife". He's often high, seeking some kind of spirituality even if it's only doing nature treks, looking at sunsets - "It was a sadness about a lot of things, but perhaps, most simply stated, it was regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes". He's aware of environmental issues while eating beef, etc. He sometimes notices that his friends feel like him. They meet an old, rich person, Wagner, who pays to have pain inflicted on him because it's the only thing he doesn't have. At the end Lily sees a landscape that excites her -
"It's like ... it was all choreographed for me," she said, her voice hushed and marveling. "Like everything was arranged for me. To experience just like this."
It took me a second to realize what she was saying and what it meant, to gather my thoughts and say the only thing there was to say.
"But that's what it is," I said. "That's what being on drugs is." - Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy - The info-packed first paragraph tells us that the 34 y.o protagonist Daniel, a freelance writer with articles in the national press, visited a famous, married tennis player, Leon, who lived in France. He's with Vicky ("my girlfriend of the time") who he's thinking of proposing to when they reach Rome. But he has doubts. She's an old friend of Leon's wife. Marion. "It was an odd moment in my life. I no longer felt young, but I didn't feel exactly old". The tennis player (once 6th in the world) no longer coaches. He's become a loner. Leo says of his wife that "instead of me she sees Leon Descoteaux. And who is that?". Daniel says that he thought he saw the real Leo at a US Open semi-final when he lost. "I said it was like watching what beauty or grace could do against power, and it made me hopeful that beauty had a chance. I had a vague idea that you could talk to French people this way.". Marion tells Vicky (they're both ex tennis players) that she and Leo hadn't slept together for a year. They have 3 kids. In the night he sees Vicky on the tennis court. Next morning she says he must have been dreaming.
Leo and Daniel chat. "What if I told you I spelt with Victoria, years ago?" Leo asks him.. Daniel's relieved then disappointed when Vicky tells him it's not true. Leo's 11 y.o. tells Daniel that Leo thinks he doesn't exist. Leo videos Daniel (on old VHS tape) playing imaginary tennis, Leo calling the shots. Daniel works up a sweat and feels "purer and happier than [he] could ever remember having felt". When Vicky sees him she says that Leo's mad, and is making Marion and now Daniel mad. She wants to leave straight away. Daniel makes them stay another night. In the morning builders are dismantling the court. Leo gives him the tape when they depart. Vicky wants him to throw it away. He doesn't. He discovers that the shots Leo made him do were exactly Leo's semi-final shots. Vicky and Daniel break up soon after. Daniel develops identity issues. - Epithalamium - When Hara (42, an attorney, divorcing) reaches her beach cottage she finds a young woman there called Lyric (a free spirit with rich Bohemian parents) who says she's been allowed to stay a few days by Zeke, Hara's ex-to-be. Lyric has invited a young man for an evening meal. They all smoke and drink on the beach. Hara has phone calls with Zeke, which help her re-orientate herself - "you start to compromise - a little here, a little there - and slowly, bit by bit, any sense you had of what was supposed to happen falls away, just slides off into the ocean until there you are, alone, on the tiny island called your life". She doesn't like people much, doesn't know the locals (she's a summer visitor, and she thinks they wouldn't like her). She finds Lyric (who doesn't fear the thought of living for the moment) useful, asks her to stay. She leaves. The end of the story is a fevered stream of consciousness.
- Dynamics in the Storm - Ben, nearly 40, has 2 kids and a wife who he loves, but she doesn't love him. He does arty film projects. He's been visiting Mark and Celeste (he'd once loved Celeste). A storm is brewing so he has to leave - a 10 hour drive home. He sees Susan (a therapist) and offers her a lift. Is Susan his wife? A colleague? They know each other well. They attended therapy together. She has 2 kids who've been with friends for 5 days. To pass time she tells him about her childhood, a college boyfriend. He's driving along the coast rather than inland to feel the storm. He's never liked the way she hides her emotions. He thinks about Celeste, about why they split up (they were too similar?). Over the weekend she said "I know what you mean ... I have days too when I look at my life ... and think ... When did this happen. ... how did I get in this deep? And I want it all to disappear". He turns off the main road, stops a while to photograph the beauty and power of nature. He wants to drive into the storm. He quizzes Susan about her inability to be close - her upbringing? The windscreen shatters. At the end they seem to be making up.
- Amy's Conversions - The narrator Jessie/Jesse, a painter, is the friend of Amy. In college days they were devout. Amy rebelled by shoplifting. She got caught. Jessie/Jesse recalls sees her in a bookshop soon after she left the church (her father was the local pastor). "If Amy's reinventions make a mess of the perspective, shivering it glasslike in a cheap cubism, can we say that my constancy deserves no less?". In Part II Jessie/Jesse decides to tell their story in the third person. She moved to Baltimore, where Amy was living with Dot. S/he arrives hoping to be friends with Amy. S/he learns that Dot and Amy might be intimate and spends the first night in Dot's bed. S/he's confused - "From within the grip of what elect delusion did she speak? Through the kaleidoscope of what half-turn disarrangement of truth?". Amy's still finding herself - "I was a child raising by wolves, she tells Sally one nothing October day. They are on a bench in Delaware, the ocean wrought and glinting. In grays and browns the day presents as grades of rupture, bands of oblivion unfolding outward - the sky, the water, the sand, the sedge.". Part III begins "You are twenty-nine". Part IV is back to the 1st person. Jessie/Jesse makes girlfriend Anita dress up as Amy, but the fantasy fails at the last moment. At the end she meets Amy again. She says she's going steady. "Or let us go deeper for a moment because this is a religious story - that is one way to understand it - and every religious story is a love story, and every love story a story about childhood."
- Tanner's Sisters - The start's characteristic - "It had been two years since I'd last seen Tanner, when he called out of the blue to say he was back in town and wanted to get together". Tanner had seemed well-adjusted, enviable. He'd suddenly given up his bank job to go to film school. Then he gave it up. Tanner had the gleaming eyes "of restless people who find refuge in the moment, the exigency of its impermanence". In what's almost a framed story, Tanner says how he slept with a fellow student who passed him onto her sister, who said "I agreed to see what was in front of me, see things for what they were, so that Rhea wouldn't have to. So that for her, meaning and motive never split, if you understand what I mean. So that language stayed intact. But it means she doesn't keep some part of herself for her alone, do you see, the way the rest of us do.". I don't understand the ending.
- Summer 1984 - It starts with a paragraph including "There is a gun in Act I. I have put it there.". The narrator is 1.5 years old when the rest of the story, narrated by Michaela, happens. She's back from college excited by Central America. She does decorating to earn money. Linda was her only friend that summer, and she's away. Michaela read Linda's letters about falling in love. She watches a wife through a window while she's on the phone to her husband. A work a colleague gets out a revolver and points at each person in the room. The final 2 pages are 30 years later, back to the first paragraph's narrator. Permission was given to use Michaela's story, though the name's been changed. Then another obscure ending.
- Metanarrative Breakdown -At nearly 50 pages, the longest story. After years of trying to be a writer, the narrator's broken through. His 97 year-old grandfather is dying. He visits his house where his 2 aunts (one Cynthia, an artist) and favourite cousin Misty live. He thinks about Gloria who he's known since student days and is now an architect. He's cerebral -
If I tried to imagine my grandfather's first-person experience of his own enfeeblement, helplessness, and mortality, I could do this only through an awareness of myself making an effort, choosing to make an effort, and so with a trace of self-congratulation spoiling the act. Nor was I even certain that this kind of transpersonal project made up a worthy or compassionate goal. It verged on pity, and pity looked an awful lot like just the displaced fear of the same happening to you. I saw this tendency of mine achieve a kind of apogee, this inability or refusal to distinguish between studium and punctum, until all I saw everywhere were the dissipating freeze-frames of life, instants of salient and perverse meaning, of felicity, contradiction, the inexhaustible poetry of juxtaposition, the eclecticism that with acts of curation becomes sensibility
Other reviews
- Dwight Garner (His characters are filmmakers and architects and writers and tennis pros ... A few are flourishing; others hang on by a fingernail. Most are in their late 30s and approaching reckonings of various sorts. ... the best of these eight stories come early. )
- Michael Deagler (These stories seek to capture the moment when their protagonists begin to doubt the way forward and turn to peer back toward home. ... Not every piece lands smoothly, and the author is prone to dense, philosophizing paragraphs that will enthrall or repel readers based on their personal tolerance for abstraction. Some passages and voices are so manneristic that they teeter, at times, into revivalist parody. The final story, “Metanarrative Breakdown,” is emblematic of Jackson’s strengths and weaknesses both: it is a lengthy, messy piece that achieves instances of staggering beauty and bewildering esoterica, delighting and frustrating the reader by turns.)
- Sarah Gilmartin (Philosophical pondering is the backbone of the collection, but does not detract from the drama. Each of the eight stories engages, but the strongest are at the beginning ... The standout story is Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy)
- Eric Farwell
- Kirkus Reviews
- Jon Doyle
Interview (He’s arrived at a literary voice that combines attention to modern minutiae (which he confesses owes something to David Foster Wallace) with an earlier generation’s attention to intense psychological realism. )
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