American Histories by John Edgar Wideman

Published by Scribner on March 20, 2018

American Histories is John Edgar Wideman’s new story collection. The four stories I’ll first mention here are masterful. The others are quite good, and the volume as a whole is another tribute to an important American writer who crafted a style that is uniquely his own. In a couple of the stories, Wideman describes his writing as unimportant, as compared to the things that smarter people do. I hope Wideman understands that his work is not just important: it’s vital.

“Williamsburg Bridge” is narrated by a man standing on the bridge where Sonny Rollins used to play his sax. The improvisational nature of jazz, its controlled chaos, fuels this story. The man has shed nearly all of his clothes and is preparing to jump, or not. He equates death with freedom, although he wonders if the bridge cops might shoot him before he has a chance to kill himself, taking away his freedom to choose, as freedom has so often been taken from people of color. He catalogs the many reasons he might want to commit suicide, but none are his motivation. It isn’t clear whether he even understands why he might choose to die, or to live. He hears “that question — why? —drum-drum drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I was able to produce.” He asks the reader whether you’re grateful that it’s his turn, not yours, at the edge. The story plays with images of color, from skin color to whitespace to colors in the East River ranging “from impenetrable oily sludge to purest glimmer.” (Edges and color are among several recurring themes in these stories.)

“Maps and Ledgers” is about families and hard times, the family histories that people don’t talk about — the father who killed a man, the son sentenced to life in prison, the grandmother with serial husbands. Bad things happen and the only thing you can count on is that life will get worse. Black and white families live apart, interacting but not really. The narrator speaks white English to whites and black English at home in his segregated neighborhood, in a society divided by laws and power that serves itself. “Don’t let the ugly take you down” the narrator’s mother says, and that’s the story’s lesson, but the lesson is easier to say than to live.

“JB & FD” are John Brown and Frederick Douglas, two men who tried to free America from the oppression of slavery. Told as an imagined conversation or correspondence over time, the story is about their fundamental agreements and disagreements, their differing strategic approaches to abolishing slavery. Douglas wishes to offer his life, not his death, to his people. Brown is convinced that an armed raid on Harper’s Ferry will spark a slave rebellion that makes the risk of death worth taking. Both men believe that change must come. The story ends with the rambling narrative of another John Brown, the son of Jim Daniels, who was rescued from slavery by John Brown and named his son after the man who gave him freedom. Wideman’s story reminds us that freedom is too precious to waste.

“Nat Turner’s Confession” takes on the controversial “confession” that Thomas Gray claimed to have received from Nat Turner. Most of Wideman’s story, like William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, is told in the first person from Turner’s perspective (“I am called Nat Turner, a name made up for the convenience of sellers and purchasers of me”), providing an alternative to the “confession” that Gray likely fabricated, at least in part. But other voices intrude in Wideman’s story, including Turner’s mother (representing the tribulations of all enslaved women) and a confession by Nate Parker (who made a movie about Nat Turner several years after being acquitted of rape). Wideman imagines Turner having a love/hate relationship with white people, a fear that he will miss them if he kills them all, a belief that “until they are gone, we will not truly cleanse ourselves of the belief that we are nothing without them.” Like many of Wideman’s stories, this one overflows with the joy of language and its rhythms.

Most of Wideman’s stories are deeply personal. “New Start” uses an aging couple watching Downtown Abbey to ask whether all our lives are performance, whether we need an audience of at least one to make them real. Our lives are stories, true stories “until we tumble out of them and then they are different and true again,” the ending unwritten and feared. In “Examination,” a visit to the doctor’s office triggers a riff on edges and democracy and social constructs and death, real and imagined. “The Writing Teacher” is about a professor, very much like Wideman, who tries to help students understand that their stories won’t appeal to every reader and that their fiction probably won’t change an intransigent and unfair world, admirable though it is to want to topple empires or to expose naked emperors. (Empires are another recurring theme.)

“Dark Matter” is about the things people discuss over dinner, but more importantly, it’s about the fact that friends go out to dinner and discuss things. “Shape the World Is In” is a monologue by a guy who is thinking about life as he sits on the toilet. “Yellow Sea” is about the evil in the world that keeps the narrator awake at night.

“My Dead” is more a contemplation of Wideman’s dead relatives than a story, but it is also a contemplation of mortality, of the impudence of life and the arbitrariness of death, of the recognition that only after people die do we really begin to give their lives the full consideration they deserve. “Bonds” is a sweet story about a woman who struggles not to give birth on an unlucky day to a child who will have enough bad luck being born into poverty and prejudice.

A few of the stories are sketches or vignettes. They discuss lines and names and death, the way things change and don’t, the divisions of people within an empire, the whiteness of snow. All of them are interesting, although I would classify some as essays rather than stories. A longer essay in the form of fiction imagines conversations between Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the end, it doesn’t matter how these pieces are categorized, because good writing has value for its own sake, and American Histories is a collection of very good writing.

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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

Published by Random House on January 16, 2018

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson, who died last year. Many of the stories continue Johnson’s exploration of the underbelly of life. Every story has a personal feel, as if the author lived the story. Perhaps he did. The collection stands as a testament to American literature’s loss of an outstanding writer.

“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” is a series of linked vignettes that describe moments in an advertising executive’s life. He drinks with other businessmen and visits a chiropractor for his bad back. He apologizes to his dying first or second wife for his marital crimes (he’s not sure which one called him but his crimes in each marriage were the same). He hears a story from a friend who interviewed a death row inmate and then interviewed the inmate’s widow in a peep show booth. He attends a small gathering of people to commemorate a dead friend and discovers that none of them really knew anything about him. He’s propositioned in a men’s room. He visits a diner during a Manhattan blizzard. And finally, he introduces himself and tells us about his work. I don’t know that the story tells the reader anything profound, but Johnson’s glimpses of an ordinary life remind us that no life is ordinary, that every experience has meaning.

While the first story isn’t as gritty as I expect from Denis Johnson, there’s plenty of grit in “The Starlight on Idaho.” A guy in rehab writes letters, mostly unsent, to family members and friends and rehab staff and God and Satan, talking about the way he wasted his last four years, putting on paper his hopes, regrets, and fears. Every word rings true. It’s funny and sad and a testament to the spirit of a guy who has good intentions and knows that isn’t enough.

“Strangler Bob” is an inmate in a story told by a scrawny inmate who earned the nickname “Dink.” Strangler Bob tells Dink that the story making the rounds about how Strangler Bob ate his wife for lunch is “a false exaggeration.” The story is amusing to the extent that it finds humor in the loss of freedom, but it’s also a sad exploration of the extent to which humans demean themselves when they fail to make a serious effort at living.

“Triumph Over the Grave” initially seems like a rambling story, but Johnson has it under his perfect control at all times. A writer talks about his friendship, as a young writer, with an older writer who wrote one great novel, now out of print and all but forgotten, like the writer himself. The story touches on other friendships, dementia and the cruelty of aging, and the courage to go on living and to be with the living when they die. This is a moving story that’s plainly written from the heart.

“Doppelgänger Poltergeist” is the story of a “spiritual felony” told from the perspective of an academic poet.. The story is about another academic poet, an itinerant visiting professor whose work is regarded as important by the small segment of society that follows contemporary poetry. The poet is of interest not for his poetry, but for his dedication to uncovering the truth about the death of Elvis, which he connects to a story about the ghost of Elvis who frequently visited a married couple (particularly the wife) while Elvis was in the Army. In the end, this is a story about obsession with conspiracy, which makes it timely — and it probably always will be timely, since unending numbers of people prefer conspiracy theories to objective reality. Yet the story suggests that there may be value in obsessions, if only because they make life bearable. More importantly, perhaps, there is value in lasting friendships with people who choose to share their secret obsessions, who elect to treat each other as blood relatives, laying bare their defining truths.

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Infinity Wars by Jonathan Strahan (ed.)

Published by Solaris on September 12, 2017

Infinity Wars collects a number of original science fiction stories about war, some of which are surprisingly good. The approaches are generally different from typical military science fiction.

The protagonist of Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship” is sent on a mission to defeat a Borg-like enemy that uses a virus to assimilate parts of other races into a single organism. To do that, alien parts must be engrafted to her body so she appears to have already been assimilated. The story is made more interesting by a moral dilemma that the narrator must confront as she comes to understand the consequences of her mission.

Nancy Kress always has interesting ideas. In “Dear Sarah,” she imagines a young woman joining the Army to fight against the anti-alien terrorists who resent the loss of jobs that followed trade with the aliens who made clean energy available (at a price) to Earth. Her family condemns her as a traitor. I think the point of the story is that a percentage of Americans will always want to blame aliens for their problems, whether the aliens are terrestrial or ET, instead of blaming themselves for their own failures. A Waco situation develops and another point of the story might be that military solutions are never good solutions to a standoff. The story works because the protagonist needs to make a tough moral choice, and internal conflicts are at the heart of strong fiction.

“Oracle” by Dominica Phetteplace is an amusing story about a woman who uses software to manage the Pentagon’s “war-of-the-month club,” its success measured by the president’s approval ratings — until the war AI begins to think for itself. Also amusing is Garth Nix’s “Conversations with an Armory,” in which a group of disabled soldiers from the last war are trying to fight the new one, but can’t convince a sentient and rather bossy armory to open its doors.

“Weather Girl” by E.J. Swift is one of the most creative and powerful stories in the volume. It imagines weather as a weapon, not by controlling weather but by suppressing satellite and other information so that countries facing devastating storms receive no warning. The story gets its power from the personal cost that the weather war has on the woman who directs it. “Perfect Gun” by Elizabeth Bear tells the powerful story of a mercenary who doesn’t have a conscience and his relationship with a weapon that does.

A planet colonized by each of Earth’s two remaining warring factions is in a low-key conflict. Eleanor Arnason’s “Mines” imagines what it is like to live there, as told from the standpoint of an ex-soldier who has two jobs: searching for land minds with her giant poached rat, and spotting soldiers who are unfit (also with the help of her giant poached rat). This is another powerful story, providing a very personal view of how war messes people up — and how others might choose not to notice.

In Rich Larson’s “Heavies,” a soldier sent to a peaceful colony to look for signs of insurrection is startled when colonists suddenly engage in the mass murder of people from Earth. The fault, of course, rests with meddlesome Earth.

Less successful entries include David D. Levine’s “Command and Control,” a fairly ordinary battle story that uses teleportation technology as the key sf device, although the story is notable for featuring Tibetan characters in a war for liberation against the Chinese. In “The Last Broadcasts” by An Owomoyela, a woman named Daja who has ill-defined special abilities is hired to cover up the fact that a distant human colony has come under attack (and will soon be wiped out) by aliens. The story focuses on her moral dilemma, although not very deeply. I liked the setting and the premise more than the story itself. “The Evening of Their Span of Days” by Carrie Vaughn reads the like first chapter of a book told from the perspective of the person in charge of repairing docked ships at a space station. A war is coming and the station needs to gear up for it. If this were, in fact, the first chapter of a book, I would happily read the next chapter because the story and the main character are interesting. The fact that the story ends without a resolution, however, is disappointing.

Stories that didn’t work for me at all: “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das is a wordy conversation or interview involving Indian soldiers tasked with defending their patch of the moon. “Overburden” by Genevieve Valentine is about an incompetent colonel seeking a promotion. Peter Watts’ “ZeroS” is a fairly typical zombie soldier story.

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The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins

Published by Scribner on July 4, 2017

The Graybar Hotel is a collection of stories about men in jail or prison. Most are told in the first person, although not always by the same narrator. They generally progress from the Kalamazoo Jail to a Michigan prison, although “The Boy Who Dreams Too Much” takes place in a transitional facility where prisoners are transferred after leaving jail as they await an assignment to a prison. “Swans,” which tells of a friendship that the narrator had before he was incarcerated, takes place in a reformatory, although it is narrated by an adult who is eight years into a life sentence. The last story, “Leche Quemada,” is told in the third person and focuses on a man who, having just been released from prison, soon realizes that a part of his mind will always live behind bars.

The tone is set in “County,” the collection’s first story. The narrator’s new cellmate in the Kalamazoo Jail describes being hit by a Cadillac, the conversation being one more way to pass time in days that are filled with emptiness, just like the fake suicide attempt that hastens the new inmate’s desired path back to prison.

Some of the stories deal with the theme of alienation, an inmate’s desire to connect in some way with the outside world. The narrator of “The Human Number” makes random collect calls from jail, connecting with people so lonely or bored that they are willing to chat with an inmate they don’t know. The narrator of “The World Out There” makes up a story about a girl who is sitting in the stands of a baseball game he’s watching on television.

Many of the stories are slices of life behind bars. “Sunshine” is a vignette about an inmate whose sister may or may not have cancer. “In the Dayroom with Stinky” relates a series of conversations between inmates. “Daytime Drama” focuses on an inmate who seems to be having mental health issues. “Depakote” talks about cigarettes, prison scams, and the perils of owing debts to other prisoners. A goose gets caught in the prison’s razor wire in “Brother Goose.”

A couple of stories discuss the lives that inmates led before they entered prison. “Six Pictures of a Fire at Night” spotlights Catfish, who cleaned up suicides and other dead bodies for a living and who may or may not have killed his wife. But “Engulfed” suggests that the inmates who talk about their outside lives are probably lying, and that the lies are an essential means for inmates to feel less bad about themselves, to construct a more productive past than the one they lived.

The most poignant story, “573543,” mixes memories of the narrator’s time as an addict with the arbitrariness of prison guards who are eager to dehumanize inmates in ways that drugs never manage to accomplish.

This is a strong collection and a valuable contribution to the genre of prison literature. Incarceration is challenging and dehumanizing, but Curtis Dawkins makes the reader remember that the majority of prisoners are ordinary people who, like most of us, are trying to make the best of our circumstances.

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The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak

Published by Open Road Media on July 4, 2017

The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories is volume 10 in the Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak. It doesn’t include Simak’s best stories, but all of the stories are good, making it one of the best volumes in the series.

In “The Money Tree,” money does grow on trees. Rich people have them, which is why they have walls and fences surrounding their property. But as Chuck Doyle learns, stealing from a money tree isn’t easy when it is protected by an alien. This is a light and amusing story and, like many Simak stories, it comes with a moral. It is also one of Simak’s many stories about kind aliens who are better than the Earth deserves.

“Shotgun Cure” is typical Simak in its focus on small towns and simple lives. A “one-horse doctor in a one-horse town” is approached by an alien who gives him the cure for all disease. Soon the entire planet is vaccinated, but it turns out that the cure comes with a price.

“Paradise” is one of the stories that comprises City. This is the story in which Fowler returns to human form to spread a utopian message about humanity’s future that is suppressed for fear that people will listen to it.

“The Gravestone Rebels Ride by Night!” might be the longest of Simak’s westerns. The hero is a frontier lawyer.

“How-2” imagines a future in which “how to” kits supply instructions and materials for everything from home dentistry to making a robotic dog. A fellow named Knight plans to build a dog but he gets a kit for a robotic person by mistake. Lawyers also play a role in this story, although they are robot lawyers who bring much needed logic and reason to the law. The courtroom scene echoes themes from some of Asimov’s robot stories, but with a unique spin. A moral of many Simak stories, including this one, is that honest hard work is a good thing, and that trying to avoid it will only lead to trouble. Too much leisure may even take the value out of life. This story was new to me, but it is on my growing list of favorite Simak stories.

“The Shipshape Miracle” tells of a lawless man who needs a miracle to leave the isolated planet on which he is stranded. The miracle comes in the form of a ship that has merged with a human (an early example of transhumanism in science fiction), but all miracles come with a price. The story has the sort of ironic ending that would have made a good Twilight Zone episode.

“Rim of the Deep” is one of Simak’s early stories, and for that reason is written in a pulp style that he largely abandoned in his later years. The story is sort of an underwater western with a gangster element and a Venusian.

Simak hinged more than one story on the relationship between immortality (or longevity) and the need to find a place to put all the people who haven’t died. Like other Simak stories that explore the theme, “Eternity Lost” (a story about a corrupt politician’s attempt to gain another life extension) asks whether longevity is a blessing or a curse and suggests that people only appreciate life because they know it has a relatively short span. Simak often gave his stories a twist ending, and is one of the better twists.

The future of an evolving mankind was another frequent Simak theme. In “Immigrant,” Seldon Bishop visits Kimon, a world that only welcomes the smartest immigrants from Earth and that has eschewed foreign trade or diplomatic relationships with other planets. Earth’s government hopes that Bishop will explain why that’s true, although no other emigrant to Kimon has chosen to do so. While aliens in Simak’s stories are usually kinder and wiser than humans, the aliens on Kimon are smug and condescending, perhaps an inevitable trait of a highly-evolved race. But the story is about the human qualities of vanity and pride, as well as the human capacity to set those qualities aside in order to gain knowledge and wisdom.

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