The Minireviews (Books 19-21)

I won't claim these as the best minireviews I've written, but no way was I going to let another weekend go by without getting to some of the backlog.  Plenty more to follow; the only question is when.

{Previous minireviews can be found here.}

Book Nineteen

And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street
by Richard Grayson
Dumbo Books
Short Stories; 289 pp.

A few months ago I got an email from Richard Grayson asking if I would be interested in reading his new collection.  He warned me that it would be a waste of my time and that the book might make for a better doorstop than reading material.  Well, if a book has the potential to keep the cool breeze flowing through my room, I can't turn it down, probably would even read it before putting it to use.  And I did.  Read it.  And man did I enjoy it.  Grayson is nothing short of a master storyteller, a man willing to take chances, to mix the straightforward narrative with avant-garde twists.  Letters to the editor, mysterious front-page ads in the New York Times, a very young Anderson Cooper, and references to YouTube and Myspace, all make for an interesting collage, a blend of nostalgia with the very contemporary. While Grayson's writing is for the most part spot on, the self-published nature of the collection means that one has to wade through a shallow swamp of typographical and assorted other errors which might be too much muck for a reader not willing to put up with these minor indiscretions.  However, the stories in this collection are worth every slight error one encounters along the way.  Highlights for me include the numerous recollections of the evolutions of theaters in Brooklyn and Broward County, the hilarious tale of a man forced to go to a lesser college by his zealous father and who ends up rooming with a monkey which he plots to kill after the monkey pees on his stuff, and the first line from the story "G--d Is My Fuckbuddy": "Significant others come and go but fuckbuddies can be forever."  One can only speculate as to why a publisher didn't give this collection a shot, but luckily for us, Grayson did all the work himself.  He's even made the book available as a free download, but save your eyes and give the man a few bucks.  You'll be glad you did.

*****

Book Twenty

Visigoth
by Gary Amdahl
Milkweed Editions
Short Stories; 212 pp.

The cover photo showing a hockey goalie knocked-out face-down on the ice made me anxious to pick up this debut collection from Gary Amdahl.  I hoped, if nothing else, I would find that great hockey story that seems to be missing from fiction, especially American fiction.  What I got from this collection was a mixed bag of the similar and familiar and the overdone that ends up being underdone.  Ah, you American male with all your pent-up rage, just waiting to erupt, just waiting to come undone.  But wait, the rage remains, the eruption quelled, just out of reach, just off the end of the page, and the story ends.  All of the stories end just when you want that explosion.  And they all sorta need that explosion, demand it.  There's plenty of potential here.  Amdahl is a fine writer with a penchant for plain, straightforward storytelling, but for the most part, this collection falls flater than the goalie on the cover.  With the exception of the very good essay "Narrow Road to the Deep North" which details the murder of Amdahl's uncle, the stories in this collection come close to being great but trail off to rather lackluster endings.  And the search for the great hockey story continues.

*****

Book Twenty-one

Drugs Are Nice
by Lisa Crystal Carver
Soft Skull Press
Memoir; 250 pp.

I'm guessing that more than a few people who don't know who Lisa Carver is will read her memoir with their Freydar turned on and be skeptical, thinking perhaps that there's no way that most of this could be true.  These days, any memoir that details a life so far from the norm might as well just be three-hundred pages about teeth pulling without Novocaine.  But one doesn't have to do much digging around on Google to find out that Carver's wild-and-crazy life has been well documented by her and others over the years.  This is an often heart-wrenching story of a girl trying to figure out who she is by becoming those things which would have killed a lesser person. Along the way, Carver forms a punk band with her best friend, falls in love with a much older French man, moves to Europe at age 19 with him and becomes part of a troupe of underground performing artists, is cheated on, turns to prostitution, falls in love with a devotee of Anton LaVey who impregnates her then abuses her.  She has her child who is born with a chromosome disorder and as so often happens with the birth of a child, things change.  Carver had spent so much of her life destroying the conventional, remaking things in her own image, it was when she became a mother that she realized that what needed remaking was her own perception of herself.  We don't get to see the finished project, only what appears to be the beginning of this rediscovery, but if I had to wager on how things will turn out, I'm betting that Lisa Carver will follow up this memoir with another one, a powerful success story, a tale of motherhood and redemption and punk rock.  There will always be punk rock.

+ See also: number one hit song interview with Carver
 

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

It seems to me that Peter LaSalle has an entire collection of hockey fictions - I know I've read one of his that if I recall, was about hockey in Montreal, that was excellent.

[david]

I've read two of the three (all except Richard Grayson's book). I loved the Carver book, and was similarly let down by Amdahl's.

However... your recommendation of George Singleton's story collection was one of the best books I have read all year. Thank you, very much.

[waydrasty]

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