Four Short Stories Where Underdogs Triumph

Title: The Cambist and Lord Iron
Author: Daniel Abraham
Where I Read It: Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008

Olaf works as a cambist in an exchange office. He unfortunately attracts the attention of a dissipated, cruel nobleman, Lord Iron, who puts him in an untenable situation that will very likely cost him his life. Olaf succeeds in extricating himself, in this story of wits and courage triumphing over power and cruelty. (Olaf is a fan of adventure novels, but his own story is an even better adventure, and he's a better example of the traits he admires in fictional heroes.)

Title: Lolita
Author: Dorothy Parker
Where I Read It: Mothers & Daughters

A vivacious, petite, and charming woman, Mrs. Ewing, has a daughter named Lolita who appears to be everything her mother isn't. She's shy and quiet; you can fail to notice she's in a room. She's plain and doesn't clean up well. She can't do much around the house. Most people in town kind of pity Mrs. Ewing for having a daughter like that, even if they have nothing against Lolita. But when Lolita gets courted by a handsome, charming man, it becomes apparent that Mrs. Ewing needs her daughter. She needs to compete with her daughter and come out on top, looking more attractive and desirable. Life has less relish when Lolita isn't around to serve as her mother's foil.

This short story came out shortly before Nabokov's novel was released. Parker's Lolita gets a considerably happier ending.

Title: The Revolt of "Mother"
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Where I Read It: Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway

Sarah Penn's husband promised her 40 years ago that she would one day have a real house, not the home that's been crumbling around the family for decades. It's a promise he has never fulfilled, instead providing nicer, newer quarters for the farm animals. At the start of the story he's determined to build another barn. When Sarah lays out her case plainly, he's unmoved. In a poignant moment she retreats to her room, emerges again after a while with red eyes, and resumes her work.

After appearing resigned, she winds up meeting his taciturn obstinacy and callousness with quiet resolve. If her husband is a wall, she finds a clever way around him that works out for everyone. There's a difference between being dutiful and being a doormat, and she knows her own mind and what's right. (Even when a clergyman comes over at once point to advise her against her unorthodox course of action, she remains resolved.) Freeman I suspect was giving Sarah the kind of satisfying outcome that she would have liked more women in the real world to enjoy, should they have been stuck with such a husband.

Title: Triumph of Justice
Author: Irwin Shaw
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions

Mike Pilato wants to receive some money owed to him. He never got the promise of this money in writing, but he doesn't think it should be too hard to go to court without a lawyer and defend his case. Typical court proceedings don't tend to favor people like Mike, who isn't polished and who pronounces Thursday as Stirday. But Mike manages to upend the order of the court for long enough to get a necessary confession. He uses methods that would lead to unjust outcomes in other situations, but here they make sense to him, because someone is brazenly lying. ('Justice' and 'respect for legal proceedings' aren't always the same...) The dialogue is key to the story's humor and keeps the text punchy.

13 short stories for Friday the 13th

I don't believe in the Friday the 13th superstition or that 13 is an unlucky number, but I thought I'd have some fun with today's date (especially because this weekend it's the Ides of March too!).

So here are a bunch of stories that are dark, disturbing, or otherwise strange, exploring fears and tragedies. The characters might be unlucky. They might also work to make themselves unlucky.

Four short stories for an unromantic Valentine's Day

Title: How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Author: Neil Gaiman
Where I Read It: Fragile Things
This reads as a twist on the tired idea that men and women are from different planets. Two teenaged boys, one of them shy and the other one more confident, wind up at a party where the girls are literally aliens - intergalactic travelers, countless galaxies in their eyes. One girl is a living poem containing the essence of a people whose planet died. Intimacy can be terrifying, what with the universe we each have in our heads.

Title: Legal Aid
Author: Frank O'Connor
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions
In Ireland, two young people fool around, the girl gets pregnant, the boy is weak-willed, the boy's father objects strenuously to the idea of marriage, and finally it's up to the girl's lawyer to try and resolve the situation out of court where it's made its way in a paternity suit. The story is full of sly humor and spot-on observations about social pressures and people's petty foolishness. It also compares people's messy actions and motives to the tidy narratives they try to spin in court - where they become 2D figures (paragons or fiends) in a staged drama that has little to do with justice. One lawyer has to choose either to destroy his target in court the way he's been paid to do or to recognize her humanity and the all around fragility and shabbiness of the situation.

Title: Liars in Love
Author: Richard Yates
Where I Read It: The Granta Book of the American Short Story
Love in this story is a temporary word, used when convenient to express a short-lived need. Play-acting at love is a way to fight off loneliness. The main character is on a scholarship in England and on his own for a while. He acts like someone else and steps into a life that isn't his. It's an intense but hollow fiction. And if he can express love as a lie so neatly during this brief, unusual interlude, what does it say about his feelings the rest of the time when he's back in his "real life?" Throughout the story, there's the sense of people engaging in the mechanics of a relationship (sex, cohabitation, meeting the partner's family), but without real intimacy. They clutch at each other for a while and remain lonely.

Title: The Littoral Zone
Author: Andrea Barrett
Where I Read It: American Short Stories Since 1945
Two scientists studying marine life have an affair. Both are married. When they're apart from their families, their relationship makes sense to them, and they think it's worth the betrayals and upheaval. But what will they discover about themselves, years later? What made sense at one point in their lives might no longer apply, and what they live on now are stories they tell to try to justify and redeem what they've lost.

In oceanography, the term 'littoral zone' refers to the part of the ocean nearest the shore (it also sounds erogenous). It's an unsteady place, subject to currents, winds, the tide, the shape of the shoreline and other sources of influence. Creatures that thought they'd learned to thrive there might find themselves gasping on dry land or thrashing around in unexpected turbulence. To keep living, they need to adapt, even if circumstances are now less favorable than they were before. To survive, they can't turn on each other. The stories they tell regulate the tension in their relationship and preserve a certain environment that allows them to both keep breathing.

Two Movies Directed by Henry Hathaway: Call Northside 777 (1948) and Kiss of Death (1947)

I don't know much about this director, but wound up by coincidence watching two of his movies fairly close together. It turns out he's directed some famous westerns, but the following two movies aren't. They're worth watching most for certain characterizations, striking visuals, and - for the first one mentioned here - historical interest too.

Good Short Fiction: The Swimmer, Tomorrow and Your Arkansas Traveler

Collection: Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen
Editor: Stephanie Harrison

Title: The Swimmer
Author: John Cheever
The Swimmer gets darker as it goes, slipping from a golden summer day to a cold nightmare. It starts with Neddy Merrill - a husband and father, a man in his prime - sitting at a friend's poolside on a beautiful summer afternoon. He hits on a crazy and fun idea: to swim the several miles back to his own house. He would do this by traveling through a string of backyards and swimming across people's pools. In his head he plots out a map of backyards belonging to people who know him and wouldn't mind him passing through their property.

Everything goes swimmingly at first - he's welcomed by everyone, and the weather is warm. Swimming through the pools in one yard after another makes him feel alive. But then a chilling atmosphere starts to creep into the story. Some friends and acquaintances aren't at home or are unhappy to see him. He's brought up short by a highway he forgot to include in his mental map. A storm is coming and the air is getting colder:

It was suddenly growing dark; it was that moment when the pin-headed birds seemed to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition of the storm's approach.

At some point the story shifts from feeling solid and real to being a dreamscape where Neddy experiences ruination. The relaxed confidence he feels at the start, when he's healthy and secure in his well-to-do community, gradually gives way to disorientation and darkness. Seasons pass by instead of hours in a lazy afternoon. This makes the start of the story seem like an illusion, a pleasant summer interlude that was never as real as it appeared. Or even if it was real, it was insubstantial; Neddy's good fortunes don't survive the journey he takes.

Is all of this taking place in his head? I could see these events play out in the mind of a man who's institutionalized or close to death as he retraces the decline of his life. The journey, in which realistic events are seeded into a dreamlike world, represents his life's reversals. Cheever's story is haunting. No one feels secure in it - not the main character or the reader.

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Title: Tomorrow
Author: William Faulkner

Uncle Gavin says it don't take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.

The narrator's Uncle Gavin is a lawyer who wants to understand why a single juror, Jackson Fentry, brought about a hung jury in a recent trial by refusing to acquit the defendant. He takes his nephew along for an investigation in the hill country where Fentry lives in poverty, his appearance "at once frail and work-worn, yet curiously imperishable." There he uncovers a depressing story about two people who might have had a better, more worthwhile life had they not been torn apart.

Uncle Gavin describes the lot of "the lowly and invincible of the earth - to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." Hanging the jury was probably the closest Fentry came in his life to administering justice, or something resembling justice; even then it was mostly a useless gesture because it couldn't bring about redemption or restore what was taken from him. This is a bleak and powerful story, and though Uncle Gavin's interest in Fentry stems from professional curiosity instead of personal concern, I like that he and his nephew become witnesses to Fentry's life.

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Title: Your Arkansas Traveler
Author: Budd Schulberg
Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes is an American media sensation, a celebrity who's styled himself as a simple man with wholesome rural values and good plain commonsense. He sings a little, spins yarns about the funny but decent folks he knows from home, and dispenses advice to his devoted listeners. The only person who really sees through him is his assistant and manager, Marcia, who helped him become famous:

I made a futile effort to explain: he was no more the voice of the people than I was, with my corrupted Vassar accent. In the sheep's clothing of rural Americana, he was a shrewd businessman with a sharp eye on the main chance. He was a complicated human being, an intensely self-centered one, who chose to wear the mask of the stumbling, bumbling, good-natured, "Shucks-folks-you-know-more-about-this-stuff-'n-I-do" oaf.

Marcia acts at various points as his personal assistant, manager, agent, business associate, therapist, and mother. What she refuses to become is his mistress (or wife). She gets him contracts, keeps him propped up through personal crises, and struggles with his increasingly out-of-control behavior:

Our suite with money and wine and women and worried executives and slave writers and stooges was just about as close as you can get in this country and this century to the ancient splendors of the Persian kings.

She starts to feel dismayed by her role in his success, how she's helped a fraud become a national voice. What also bewilders her is people's willingness to blindly adore him and keep him in the spotlight. Admittedly Lonesome manages to do some good for some people. He also tells them what they want to hear; he plays on their white-washed imaginings of a simpler past inhabited by simpler people. As the story unfolds he uses his power in increasingly reckless ways, something you see over and over again with politicians, celebrities, demagogues and other charismatic manipulators. His public image becomes too inflated for him to handle with any sense of proportion. When he finally goes down only Marcia is there to witness it.

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Other stories from this anthology can be found here.