Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone

EXCELLENT STORIES, NOT POP

a book review by New Pop Lit

If she got the job, Ruth would have to sign a waiver agreeing to be quarantined if something serious broke out in the ward . . . “You could be quarantined for several months.”

“Sure,” she said. “Fine.”

DIRTY REALISM was a term used to describe a style of American short story writing of the mid-1980s, popularized by Raymond Carver and Joy Williams, among others. Hemingway-and-Chekhov inspired, the style is characterized by deadpan prose and a matter-of-fact attitude. Realistic? To the max. The characters are working class, resigned to their fate, with not even the possibility of change. There’s emotion– sometimes a lot of it– but it’s invariably off-stage or between the lines.

This is the writing style Emma Duffy-Comparone follows in her new collection of stories, Love Like That. Nine Stories of people working jobs or looking for jobs; children, teens or adults seeking refuge or answers. The stories contain drama but it’s understated drama, even when the occurrences are anything but. They’re not without humor– a kind of self-mocking dry humor. The tales ostensibly aren’t about the pandemic and American life over the past year, but they may as well be. They convey a beaten-down pandemic mood.

As with any short story collection, not every story is a masterwork, but a few of them are. Duffy-Comparone is like an opera singer attempting to hit a high note in an aria. With at least three of the stories, she nails it.

“Marvel Sands” is about a fifteen year-old girl who gets a job at a state park.

At six that night, I hosed down the showers, changing rooms, and foyer, steering the sand into the steel traps in the middle of the floor and out the doors. The work was surprisingly physical. At one point I looked at myself in a mirror. My neck and throat were red. My hair was frizzed. I bent over and soaked my head with the hose. Within minutes my scalp felt hot again.

Lurking in the story are two mature males of ominous presence, one her mother’s boyfriend, the other her boss.

With this story as in all the stories there’s no editorializing. Just laying out the reality– the facts– and sometimes not all the facts. Enough vibrates nearby for the reader to know what’s happened.

“Sure, Fine,” is the most powerful story of the nine, yet at the same time the most positive– if anything about these bleak tales can remotely be considered positive. An accident occurs during a shift at a very crummy job– by the end, as brutal as life is– as it’s shown to be– there’s a quiet, unspoken triumph simply at having survived it.

The best story, maybe because it’s more complex, runs deeper, is “Exuma.” In its way, a contorted love story. Nothing is resolved plotwise, yet at the same time by the end maybe something is resolved– a step toward resolution and healing for a damaged human being. What am I talking about? To know, you’ll have to read the story.

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This collection and its author face a dilemma. Like the original tales of dirty realism, these stories will not be immediately accessible to the ordinary reader. Even Raymond Carver was more popular with writers than with the general reading public. Unlike Ernest Hemingway, he didn’t opt for glamorous people and exotic locations. All glamor was stripped away. For many readers, it was their shitty lives staring back at them.

Beyond this, Emma Duffy-Comparone is in a situation analogous to that of a current-day rock guitarist, who might be able to play better than Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen ever could, but few people care, because guitar stars are already in their pantheon and unless someone completely reinvents the form there’s no room for more.

Duffy-Comparone is every bit the story writer Raymond Carver was, but isn’t a familiar name even among writers.

Maybe this will change.

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LOVE LIKE THAT is available from Henry Holt.

Photo of Emma Duffy-Comparone by Dave Brainard.

The Promised End by Ron Singer

A Review by New Pop Lit

I had trailed him for two blocks now, long enough to decide that theft was the better option. Why? He looked like a guy who wanted his old, good jacket more than money he didn’t need.

There are two kinds of short stories.

One is the kind of story written to impress a creative writing instructor, full of wordy flourishes of what I call sentence fetish, with the story itself a secondary consideration. As often as not there is no story, only the flourishes.

The other kind is a story– a tale to be told– related in the simplest but most interesting way possible. These stories are written not for professors or critics but for readers.

THE PROMISED END by Ron Singer is the second kind. A collection of twenty tales, perfect for picking up at the end of a stressful day (there’ve been many stressful days), after dinner, after you’ve fed the cat and want to relax. When you’re ready to escape into intelligent stimulation. To lose yourself in the comfortable pleasures of well-constructed narrative.

A few of the locations in the collection are exotic. All of the stories carry the personality of the narrator, a genial New Yorker. Like a good television series, not every one of the entries is classic– but several are, with the others never less than absorbing.

Two of the stories are masterful.

“A Nose for a Jacket” is about a man considering stealing a rare jacket. Is he out-thinking himself? Tension mounts as he considers precisely how to make the grab, the challenges and possible consequences. It’s an examination into the mind of every one of us. By the end the character– and ourselves– are wiser. What happens next? This is always the essence of fiction writing.

***

In addition to the two addresses, the box bore the frightening official stamp of the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, which is the principal arm of the country’s elaborate security apparatus, sometimes referred to as “the deep state”. The box had been opened and re-taped shut. This stamped and re-sealed box spelled potential disaster.

“The Key” is the longest and best story in the volume– on the surface a simple story with a simple complication involving a couple returning from vacation in Turkey and realizing they didn’t return their hotel key. They soon discover that in another country– and in their own– nothing is ever simple.

Entertainment and wisdom? For the avid reader, The Promised End provides exactly that.

(The book also has a striking cover containing an artwork by Elizabeth Yamin.)

Purchase The Promised End here.

*******

(Photo of Ron Singer)

The Gimmick by Vern Smith

Reviewed by New Pop Lit

“I like this gimmick. The gimmick’s good.”

“Cops are smarter than you think. Get in, get out. That’s what dad always says, and he never got pinched once.”

-from “The Gimmick”

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THE GIMMICK— novelettes, stories, and sketches by Canadian-born writer Vern Smith— starts slowly. The first story is about two men in a diner, the second about two men in a park. Why open with them? It might be the author’s way of easing the reader into his style of writing. Or he might be misdirecting– sandbagging– setting up the stories to follow.

Third in the collection is the title piece: “The Gimmick.” Top-level detective fiction with a noir feel. Think Walter Mosely. Two police detectives pursue a scam-artist couple who’ve robbed bank customers at ATM machines– including a detective. The robbed detective is eager to get them back.

The characters are fully drawn and completely absorbing. The plot, unpredictable right to the end.

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Meanwhile, you’re still walking.

The tie is strangling you.

You feel the extra starch they put in your shirt, always too much starch.

Sweat is dripping off your brow.

You are the oldest young man on earth.

-from “You Need Something to Slow You Down”

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Most of the stories which follow are Kafkaesque. Their protagonists seem to be hanging in the air, upside down, at some shitty job or in some absurd life from which there’s no escape. They stumble through this universe drugged, puzzled, or numb, waiting for their next misstep.

But the best story in the collection, “The Great Salmon Hunt,” is a simple adventure story set aboard a fishing boat chartered by two brothers who hope to win a big salmon fishing contest. The tale contains its own version of absurdities via the personalities of the two brothers– resulting in comedy combined with high excitement. Hemingway would love it. 

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More discord than harmony, it was music without a message, music without words, music that related to the concept of nothingness.

-from “Natalia Cauzillo’s Last Ride Out”

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The last short tale, “Natalia Cauzillo’s Last Ride Out,” is an apt coda to the collection– a culmination of themes as a sharply drawn young woman deals with her own discontent within another of the insane systems of now. 

Kafka meets Sherwood Anderson: the nonstop parade of quirky characters, like Natalia, are the strong point of Smith’s writing. Linkages in his created world– which appears uncomfortably similar to our own.
***

The Gimmick is available from Run Amok Books, at Barnes and Noble, at Kobo, and other outlets.
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(Photo of Vern Smith.)

Go-Go Day by Elizabeth Sims

Reviewed by New Pop Lit

Regina knew perfectly well what Barb and everybody else thought of her. She was a Seybold. Her brothers and sisters, all way older, were gone from the house except Earl, the third oldest, who had been and come back from Afghanistan and was having a hard time getting interested in working. The Seybolds lived in the shabbiest double-wide in Dustin Point, Michigan. You could almost smell the cigarette smoke and dirty feet from the street.
****

ANYONE assessing America’s best short story writers needs to include Elizabeth Sims in their survey.

GO-GO DAY presents four stories– only four, but every one, in different ways, is terrific. They’re sustained by hidden wit and a large underpinning of humanity.

The four tales:

“Dixon Amiss”:  Two one-armed men show up at a man’s door one Saturday morning, ostensibly to look at an old-fashioned printing press, bringing with them much tension.

“The Cashmere Club”:  Two high school girls discuss shoplifting a cashmere sweater in order for one of them to join an exclusive school club.

The best story in the collection,  “The Cashmere Club” is also one of the best stories you’ll read this year, or any year. Like the other three tales, the narrative keeps the reader off balance at the same time it achieves– beyond the complications of plot– surprising understanding and depth. Ultimately, a sense of context about the dilemmas of time and life

“West Forkton Days”:  A young man with expansive dreams arrives back in his Indiana home town from Los Angeles for the funeral of his father.

Hale knew that hardly anybody who wanted to succeed in the film business actually did. Everybody he met in LA told him over and over how hard it was to make it, what a bastard of a market it was to crack. And yet everybody was trying like a maniac to be the one.

This story could be called wise but it’s also hilarious. Hale Hobson is all of us– a striver, a dreamer, but a little bit lazy and more than a bit hapless

“Go-Go Day”:  The title story is about an elderly home owner asked by her city to clean up the swimming pool in her yard, which hasn’t been touched in years. Memories and complications ensue. Catch the double meaning of the phrase “We’re Going Places!” evident at the end

These are four excellent stories which demonstrate that the short story can be readable and engaging, yet also contain wisdom and convey meaning about what it’s like to be a human being in this crazy world. Which is what literature is really about.
*******

Find out how to read Go-Go Day here.

(Photo of Elizabeth Sims.)

1987 and Other Stories by Vladimir Kozlov

Reviewed by New Pop Lit

Igor died at the end of the ninth grade in May. He was drinking wine on the bank of the river, then he went swimming and drowned.

Ten tough stories from Russian author Vladimir Kozlov which are distinctly unromantic. Most are set during perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, examining the lives of those coming of age in that system. Incidents include a man picking up a woman on a bus, a boy falling off a roof, punks celebrating Hitler’s birthday; protests and police; classrooms, liaisons, rebellions, fights– a lot of them– and unemotional, often awkward dates. To say this is a world without illusion is an understatement. There are enough glimpses of now to believe things in Russia since then have not greatly changed.

Lenka’s father was an alcoholic and used to be a math teacher. People said he sobered up and fell off the wagon a bunch of times, and that he was fired from his regular job because of it. Now he was working as the school’s security guard at night.

But he also used to be a poet, and ten years ago or maybe longer, his poetry always used to get published in the city newspaper. Lenka hated her parents and they hated her.

The two best stories in the collection are the title story, “1987”– about the arrival of punk music and punk attitudes into a Soviet town– and “Olya.”

I walked on further to Victory Square. I went into the Dawn Bookstore, in the five-story building next to the trolley bus stop. Olya was sitting behind the counter, reading a book wrapped in a newspaper dust jacket. She looked up at me and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I answered. “You work here?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Olya” is a pessimistic tale about a young woman with much promise, then with no promise. An analogy to the society. The character is never described, but we can see her, the expression on her face, based on her words and her life. Fallen potential– the story opens with the narrator thinking he glimpsed her twenty-five years later, but he isn’t sure.

The theme of these stories is the absence of dreams– the impossibility of dreams.

“Worker’s is a neighborhood for lame-o proletarians and peasants. The worst part is, the teachers that work at that school get to be the same way after a while. I know they all used to talk about me. But I don’t give a shit.”

Another very good story is “The Major,” which we’re privileged to present as our current fiction feature, for the first time anywhere in English, as translated by Andrea Gregovich.
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After I read the stories, I went with my contributing editor KMC to a small diner in a depressed community downriver of Detroit. Three high school students, two boys and a girl, lounged in one of the booths. Tough kids. I realized that Kozlov’s stories reminded me of downriver Detroit. The same sense of being trapped in a box; same gray attitude and acceptance of life.

Vladimir Kozlov’s stories are unflinchingly real.
****

Right now you can purchase this collection as an e-book for only five dollars, at Fiction Advocate, here. Buy it and keep up with the authentic literary world.

(Photo of Vladimir Kozlov.)