Short Story Club: "How the Devil Came Down Division Street" by Nelson Algren

Hey! Welcome to Short Story Club. Glad you could make it. Come on in and grab a seat. Jami was just about to tell us what she thought of this month's story— and there should be a shrimp cocktail floating around here somewhere. Jami?

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“How the Devil Came Down Division Street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

This quote sets the tone for a tale that, at its conclusion, is an introspective look into the mind of a man not quite thirty years old, a man who has yet to overcome what his thirteen year old self saw, what he didn’t see, and what he feared because of the space between the two perspectives.  Roman is the son of a renowned drunk, a street performer, a sad excuse of an accordion player who doesn’t live with his family so much as he has a place to sleep when he returns home in the mornings after a night of roaming the streets for pennies.

Roman’s father hears a constant knocking at the door of their home, at least that is what he tells his family but no one believes him.  Rather, Roman and his twin siblings think their father is crazy. They share a bed at night when he is philandering or at worse, begging and in the daytime while their father sleeps it off, the children go to school and pretend he is different.  Their mother doesn’t encourage nor does she dissuade her children from feeling this way and by allowing the speculation, she is implicit in the reactions her children have to their father, a mixture of  embarrassment, shame, and ultimately, misunderstanding.

One day Roman’s father returns without his accordion.  Things change.  He doesn’t wander the streets at night any longer.  He becomes a husband to their mother again, takes a job as a janitor but, he takes a bed too.  The knocking is heard by Roman.  He believes his father, doesn’t think he is crazy any longer but his mother does the unthinkable and trades the sanity of her son for the newfound respectability of her husband.  So  Roman then, at age 17 is pushed out, finds himself with nowhere to spend his nights, no place to call his own and so he takes to the bars himself.  As Algren puts it, “he came to think of the dawn, when the taverns closed and he must go home as the bitterest hour of the day.”  

The bitterest hour of the day.  That’s where Nelson Algren takes the reader and with straightforward language and crisp descriptions, Roman is any one of us or all of us, giving up our accordions for a place to sleep, a place to call our own.

 —Jami McFatter Balkom is an attorney, practicing in Panama City, Florida who writes short story reviews for her blog, www.wherewordslive.blogspot.com.  She is currently writing fiction, working on a novel of literary fiction and a series of short stories centered around her hometown in northwest Florida.

So what did the rest of you think of the story?

Short Story Club Returns

We’ve been derelict in our Short Story Club duties, but leave it to our audience to rekindle the flame. Reader and blogger Jami Balkom has offered to throw the spotlight on a short story by Nelson Algren, an author we’ve never covered on this blog. We’ll post the story today, and invite you all to throw in your own two cents tomorrow. Without further ado, here’s Jami’s introduction (Thanks, Jami!) :

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Nelson Algren was one of the most popular literary fiction writers in America during the later 40’s and early 50’s,  providing a unique and loud voice for the down-and-outer, for the failures of society, for those who never made it to the inside of any circle.  This reputation was largely based on Algren's novel A Walk on theWild Side   which was made even more famous by this Lou Reed song:

But it was his short story collection, The Neon Wilderness, that started it all, published in 1947, just two years before the release of his National Book Award winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.  The loser in all of his manifestations-- drug addict, homeless scavenger, cheating husband, street performer begging for change, all of them came to life in Algren’s short stories, paving the way for a career that would define the author as much as the author shaped the world inhabited by his stories’ characters.  The short story “how the devil camedown division street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

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Here’s how Algren kicks off the story:

“Last Saturday evening there was a great argument in the Polonia Bar. All the biggest drunks on Division were there, trying to decide who the biggest drunk of them was. Symanski said he was, and Oljiec said he was, and Koncel said he was, and Czechowski said he was.

“Then Roman Orlov came in and the argument was decided.”

Read the rest here, and come back tomorrow for Jami’s take, and to add some thoughts of your own!

Short Story Club: "Wakefield" by E.L. Docotorow

Welcome to short story club. It’s good to see you all after so long. Come on in and have a seat. Tucker’s just warming up some pigs-in-a-blanket and Orlando’s on the can. He’ll be out in a minute.

What did everyone think of “Wakefield?” I’ll probably be a little more negative than I typically am, but despite the criticisms that follow I thought it was a pretty compelling read.

The first time I read this story I was infuriated by the ending. I felt like punching Doctorow in the nose. He completely neglected the most interesting part of the story: what the hell would happen when Wakefield walked back through his front door.

But I'll give him credit for keeping me reading. It was a Kafka-esque exploration of an unthinkable "what if" scenario, but he managed to make it plausible. I found that fascinating. But it was the carrot of the ending that kept me going, and when I realized in the last paragraph that there was in fact no carrot... well, I felt used and dirty.

A couple more criticisms:

• his wife never called his cell-phone?
• the whole crux of the story was that he was this lucid, intelligent man, but then we're supposed to believe he survived for months on pristine table scraps from neighborhood garbage cans?
• We're supposed to believe that he did so without being noticed?
• He didn't freeze his butt off until after Thanksgiving? In a New York suburb? In real life he'd be dead by Halloween.
• The secretive aid of the mental patients was kind of hard to believe.
• At one point the mental patients all disappear, then magically reappear to give him a spongebath?
• And his own wife didn't recognize him after an absence of just 6 months or so? Really? Standing eye-to-eye?

I dunno. I'll call it a great story, and it did give me a lot to think about. I'll even say that the ambiguous ending is okay. But I think his editor failed him on a number of simple continuity errors, and I'm afraid they amount to a pretty tall tale when taken altogether.

But yeah, I actually really liked it. What did you think?

Short Story Club Returns

It’s been far too long since our last John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club post, but we’re going to go ahead and rectify that right here. This month’s story is a doozy- you’ve been warned- but I have to admit I was drawn into it completely.

As the autumn weather turns cold and our thoughts turn to the upcoming holidays we’ll be spending with our families, it’s only natural to read a story about a man who  decides, on a whim, to squat secretly in the attic above his own detached garage while his family copes with his supposed disappearance, right? Right.

Here’s the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s short story “Wakefield:”

“People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage.”

Read the rest here.   Then come back tomorrow for the discussion.   It’s on.

Short Story Club: "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge"

Come on in and have a seat. We’re just getting started.

What did everyone think of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge?”

It’s a little different than the other stories we’ve covered, but I think it’s got a great opening- one that has you asking yourself questions immediately. After that it seems Bierce quickly overplays his hand, getting bogged down in a lot of overly detailed stage direction: who was standing where, how they were holding their guns, what their ranks were, etc., etc, etc. Most modern readers will find themselves skipping ahead. (You're pathetic. Go hang your heads in shame.)

But I’m actually going to defend Bierce here. At first I chalked the heavy description up to the time period and the nineteenth century tendency to belabor every detail. Then I started to think that maybe he was just capturing the hyper-awareness of a man who was staring at his imminent death- sponging up every last impression that this world could give him. Both of those theories might be true, I suppose. But I think he’s doing something else here.

He feeds us all those details so that we’re drawn into the story once all of those pointless bystanders start to play a significant role, as they react to his noose snapping and rush to shoot him in the water instead. The reader revisits those early details and tries to figure out whether our hanged man has a real chance at escape. I thought it was a great way to build up the tension.

I also liked the flashback explaining how we got to the hanging. Bierce lets us chew on what’s happening, while he cuts away for some interesting backdrop. Again, he’s letting the tension simmer and percolate.

And then we really get some nice things happening. The noose breaks, our man is in the water, and what was a kind of sleepy, plodding story is now a life and death struggle. I love the description we get along the way:

“He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the water-spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.”

And then, of course, the ending! Bierce has yanked our chain! And yet we’re not angry, because hey, maybe that really is  what occurs in that instant before your neck snaps. Sounds pretty plausible to me.

Here's the Oscar-winning short, for those of you who were too damn lazy to read it.

Anyone else like it? Hate it? Tell us why in the comments.

Short Story Club Selection for June

Yes, friends. It’s that time once again.  

This month we’re going to take a trip in the WABAC Machine and examine a story that was first published in 1890:  Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.” Why did we choose this story? For one, we’ve never talked about brother Bierce on this site. And for another, this particular story contains one of the all-time great, swift-kick-to-the-crotch  endings.

Here’s how it begins:

“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.”

Click here to read the full story, and then get yourself back here tomorrow for the discussion. Tucker’s making his world famous bruschetta, you won’t want to miss it.

Vast Hell

Welcome again to the Short Story Club and the premiere (on ShelfActualization.com) of Guillermo Martinez's story "Vast Hell." (full text of the story can be found here)

I first happened upon this story in The New Yorker a few years back, and I remember liking it.  Upon re-reading it now, I realize it is a surprisingly simple story, by which I mean that the story maintains good inertia until the finish, without deviations or tangents or overly-cooked rhetoric.  It's just simple.

Martinez is good at lacing into the story "significant moments" that give the story its inertia.  Moments such as "suddenly, it had all become true" on the penultimate page, or "then the inspector shouted that he'd hit something" on the last page.  Simply put, there is no drag to the story.  It moves, and moves quickly.

What I love most about the story, though, is the ending (which in my opinion is often the hardest component of a story to execute well).  In this case, "The French Woman returned a few days later: her father had completely recovered.  We never mentioned the boy again.  The tent was stolen as soon as the holiday season started."  The whole story is one huge crescendo (an erotic affair!), and then more crescendo (disappearance of the lovers!), and then even more crescendo (they're dead! buried on the beach!) and then CRESCENDO (there are dead and mutilated bodies all over the beach!), and then that  last line, which is the equivalent, of a big "Never Mind."

It's clever.

What are your thoughts?  Two thumbs up?  One thumb up and one down?

(Postscript:  The one component of the story I didn't quite grasp was why the inspector shot the dog at the end.  It seemed out of place.  Granted, there had been a lot of violence and death, but shooting the dog seemed too easy . . . didn't it?  What was the purpose?)

Short Story Club . . . Vast Hell

Welcome all to this month's edition of ShelfActualization's Short Story Club.  This month's story is "Vast Hell" by an Argentine named Guillermo Martinez.  The story was published in The New Yorker in April 2009.  But, besides the fact that Guillermo holds a PhD in "Mathematical Logic" from the University of Buenos Aires, we don't know much about him.

Here is the link to the story.

We'll review and discuss tomorrow, so please join us!

"The Trench" by Erri De Luca

Welcome back to ShelfActualization's monthly short story club.  This month, we have a dandy.  To start, look at this opening line:

"When I found the sewer pipe I was happy, but I couldn't smile."

Beautiful, short, and altogether intriguing.  But the rest of the story is what really burns me up.  I've been fascinated by this story for years simply because it takes an otherwise ordinary, or even sub-ordinary, situation (that of digging a trench outside of Paris to locate a buried sewer pipe) and converts this ordinary situation into an immense moment of profundity.

All of a sudden down in this ordinary trench with a shovel and pick ax, we are dealing with a myriad of profound human experiences.  For example:

• Identity ("The other man was me, a thirty-two year old Italian laborer . . . At midday, between mouthfuls of highly spiced watery soup, we talked for a while in our rudimentary common French, then each returned to his own thoughts in his mother tongue.")

• Sanity ("At the end of the first week the man who was with me started to crack . . . 'Trouve? Tu l'as trouve?' the hoarse voice of a lost man, the common exhalation of the trenches of the century.")

• Death ("I assured him that if the trench were going to collapse it would do so only at night, when the damp came . . . one shouldn't speak of death with one's foot in the grave.")

• Socioeconomics ("But why should a man have to suffer this way?  Why in the world should a human being have to earn bread for his children with a noose around his neck?") 

• Free Will ("Then I decided that he was no help to me - I would manage better on my own. So, in front of the other workers, I asked [the boss] to let me finish the job alone."

Thus we have an ordinary situation laced with profound themes.  And so, my conclusion is this:  The Trench masterfully portrays the immensity of a mundane moment in a trench with a shovel under the French sky.  And why do we not notice more often the immensity of mundane moments in our own lives?

Why?

Short Story Club: The Trench by Erri De Luca

Welcome (again) to ShelfActualization.com's Short Story Club.  This month's selection comes to us from arguably the most over-trodden god-forsaken country of Europe: Italy.

But, in spite of my low-level contempt for Italy, I find this month's short story selection very relevant.  Erri De Luca published The Trench in the March 2006 edition of The New Yorker.  I am assuming most of us are completely unacquainted with Erri De Luca, so let's have a quick look:  Born in 1950 in Naples, he has become a radical left wing idealist.  He has worked in Italy and France as a truck driver and mason.  Now considered to be a recluse, he lives in an isolated cottage in the hills far outside of Rome.

Now again, he is Italian.  So that sucks.  But let's get over it.  Here is the link to The Trench.  We'll meet back here tomorrow to discuss.  I couldn't look forward to it more than I currently do.

Short Story Club: "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in and pull up a chair. There’s a cheese board on the piano, and there should be a tray of Little Smokies circulating somewhere. Anyway, what did everyone think of “Harrison Bergeron?” It’s a little different than our usual fare, right?

I’m not a regular reader of absurdist, dystopian, science-fiction satire, but I am  an unapologetic sucker for the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I don’t know many writers who can mix humor and brutality as casually or effectively as he can. This story is unabashedly campy, especially the lame joke at the end, but as is always the case with Vonnegut, the reader is really made to think.

But what exactly are  we supposed to think about this one? The message of this story is not the one I would have expected from an avowed Lefty and lifelong member of the ACLU. He basically takes the fight for universal equality to extremes (some might even say its logical conclusion) and the result is a dystopian hell where you can see your own child gunned down on tv and forget about it a moment later (or miss it entirely because you were too busy making yourself a sandwich.) So it goes, I guess.

What did the rest of you think?

Short Story Club Selection for March

We’re still experimenting with various approaches to our monthly Short Story Club. This month we’ll try to shorten the timeline just a tad. We’ll post the story today, and invite discussion tomorrow, to see if having it fresh in your minds will spur some of you to finally get off your duffs and comment.

This month’s selection is another short one: “Harrison Bergeron,” By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Here’s the opening:

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”  

[ReadOn]

And in case you wanted some rubric by which to judge the story beyond the simple “liked it/hated it” standard, I thought we’d also share Vonnegut’s philosophy on short stories and what makes them work. Here he is, in his own words, below:

See you tomorrow!

Short Story Club: "Orientation" by Daniel Orozco

Welcome to Short Story Club, thanks so  much for coming. Let’s see, I think you know just about everybody - Oh, here, Tucker will take your coat. Go ahead and have a seat, and whatever you do, don’t leave without trying one of Orlando’s peanut-butter squares. They’re to die for.

So what did everybody think about “Orientation?” Tucker jumped the gun a little bit when I first posted the story, so I’ll kick things off with his reaction:

“OK, I didn't like it.
“Let me be more specific: I liked the "idea" but I didn't like the "execution." Once I read the first page, I realized that the story was essentially THAT (except for a little blurb about a serial killer).
“In short, to me, the story has nothing that makes it interesting. In fact, it's terribly uninteresting.
“I didn't like it.”

I can kind of see where he’s coming from- the story’s definitely not a thrill ride- but I think that’s precisely the point. “Terribly uninteresting” sounds like a pretty apt description of the cubicle life Orozco’s trying to convey. If you mean, Tucker, that the story gets repetitive, then fine. I’ll agree with you. I think that’s the intent. You get a taste in four pages of the career-length hell that awaits the speechless protagonist. Most of us don’t have to work at “Initech” to relate to that in some way. John Williams had this to say about Orozco’s collection in the NY Times Sunday Book Review:

The stories in Daniel Orozco’s debut collection convey a sense of workplace alienation that would make Karl Marx cringe. The opening lines of “Orientation,” the first story, place us squarely under the fluorescent lights of comically absurd employment: “Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual.”

Workplace alienation. Comically absurd employment. If that’s what Orozco was going for. I think he nailed it. What did you think? Sound off in the comments.

Short Story Club Selection for February

Alrighty. Time to unveil our February selection for the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. It’s a short one, but it’s an instant classic for anyone that’s ever worked out of a cubical. (I’m typing this post in the bath of fluorescent light that pervades my own little 8’x8’ slice of cube heaven, and some of you might just be reading this in similar surroundings.)

The story for this month is “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco, from his collection by the same name. Access the four-page story for free here, or purchase the entire collection below. Then come back here on Saturday the 25^th of February, and we’ll heap praise/pick it apart/do whatever it is we do at Short Story Club.

Here's the opening:

“Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.” 

[Read More]

Short Story Club: "Walter John Harmon" by E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in, have a seat, and let’s get down to business. Tucker and Orlando are in the kitchen preparing watercress sandwiches. As we announced before, the focus of this month’s discussion is the rather lengthy short story “Walter John Harmon” by E.L Doctorow. It’s a fascinating yarn about life in a religious cult- as told by a believer, who also happens to be the group’s in-house counsel attorney.

In what we hope becomes a tradition, we’ve asked for guest posters to kick off our discussion. And who better to inaugurate the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club, than Mr. John R. Lyman himself. (And no, that’s not him pictured above. That would be Doctorow.) What did you think, Lyman?:

I hadn't thought much about cults lately, which isn't all that easy to do when you share a home state with the Lafferty brothers and Warren Jeffs.  Half the time you're trying to just read an article about last week's football game in the local paper you get smacked in the face with horror stories about child brides and tales of end times. At a certain point you tune them out. After reading "Walter John Harmon" I had a better sense of why: most cult stories are invariably told somewhat uninterestingly by outsiders, because in the most interesting cults members don't do much talking to rest of the world. That type of reporting often leads to a list of weird acts and crimes, but never seems to get to the crux of the cult itself. It's a bit like reading a Woodward and Bernstein article on Watergate without any input from Deepthroat.  

In my mind Doctorow's story, although of course fictional, offers as plausible an account as any "true" story of life in a cult. The feeling of complete inadequacy ("I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification") mixed with the supreme arrogance of knowing you're right about something while the rest of the world is completely wrong ("In the end, no one could withstand the warmth and friendliness of our Embrace."). And, of course, the utter fear of cognitive dissonance, which drives so much of what anyone does but seems to especially affect those in a cult. "Hmm, the prophet ran off with my money and wife -- either I've been a total tool for the last five years of my life or this is all part of the master plan. Let me go talk to a few of the other elders who might have been fooled, too. . . yep, it was all part of the master plan!"

At times the story shows its age. For whatever reason cults were a bigger deal in the late 90s and early 2000s than they are now. Perhaps there was less going on then, or maybe the American public has just come to accept religious wackos now and isn't as interested as reading about them. The passages on the Internet are borderline funny. I had forgotten there was a time -- 2003, apparently -- when people actually used the term "Web log" instead of blog. And if Doctorow wrote the story today he'd either cut the entire descriptive paragraph after "Betty and I learned about Walter John Harmon from the Internet" (really, where else would you learn about a cult?) or replace it with, "Initially we friended Walter on Facebook, which is where all his followers must first declare their loyalty. Then we watched some really funny YouTube videos of him playing with his cats." But the essence is timeless. Life is pretty damn scary for some people and it's nice to have a place to fit in, even at the expense of your wife, livelihood, and rationality.

Thanks, John. What about the rest of you? Do you agree? Disagree? Like the story? Dislike the story? What did you think about the world Doctorow created here? Have at it in the comments!

The JRLMSSC Is Born

Yesterday’s post on short stories was part love song, part lamentation. Today we tell you what we’re going to do about the lamentation part of things.

But first, appropriately, a very short story:

The other day I was included on an email chain between the participants of a once-great book club. As often happens in life, this half dozen men in their early thirties had been spread far and wide by the grad-school/professional diaspora, and now meets only once a year during the holidays. From what I could tell, a few half-hearted emails are occasionally traded to spur or check on progress, and at least one daunting title had been jettisoned midway through the year to stave off a mutiny of the disinterested.

But then something interesting happened. One of them circulated a short story he thought just might intrigue the group. What followed was a flurry of emails and informal reviews that ranged from high praise to “not-that-great,” and from profound and eloquent to downright hilarious. In fact, I’d never seen a group of non-writer thirty-somethings mobilize themselves to a literary discussion quite so quickly before. It spawned an epiphany of sorts:

Short stories are short. People will actually read them. The point of the story can usually be smoked out of its hiding place in very little time, and you can say about it what you want to in the space of a short email or blog comment. They are infinitely better suited to comprehensive club-type discussions than the long works of fiction that three-quarters of the group never likes, and half the group never reads.

And that is why we’re establishing the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. Every month we’ll post the link to a fantastic short story for you to read, and on the appointed day you’ll return to hear some of our thoughts, and to share some more of your own. It will be spectacular.

Now, are we the first short story club in existence? Certainly not. Are we the best short story club in existence? It’s likely. But we know we’re the only one that enjoys the ongoing patronage of Mr. John R. Lyman. So who is this great man, you ask? That’s a great question, and we look forward to all your great questions, comments, complaints and criticisms as we launch the short story club that bears his name.

First up for the JRLMSSC in January? We might as well start with a doozy: “Walter John Harmon” by E.L. Doctorow, published in the New Yorker in 2003, and collected in his 2004 book Sweet Land Stories. Here's the opening:

When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work the Seventh Attainment was still not mine. [Read More]

It is Fascinating. You won't want to miss it. Click the link, read it, mull it over, and come back here to hash it out on Thursday January 19^th.

And don't forget, the first rule of Short Story Club is: you do not talk about Short Story Cl– wait a minute, no… that’s another club. The first rule of Short Story Club is tell everyone about short story club. It’s gonna be off the chain!