Pam's Book Log

14 July, 2003

Most of the books I read are chosen through familiarity (i.e. authors I've enjoyed in the past) or recommendations. Occasionally, I'll pick up a book pretty much at random: I'll be browsing in a bookstore, something will catch my eye, and I say to myself, "Self, this looks like something I'd enjoy, let's give it a go." Surprisingly, this has worked out rather well for me, resulting in such good reads as Across the Nightingale Floor and Empire of Bones.

This book, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales was one of those random choices. I noticed that it has a fair number of authors whose work I've enjoyed in the past-- Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King-- as well as quite a few who I've never read, but who've gotten good reviews from others. What really drew my attention, however, is the premise Chabon puts forth in the introduction:

Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half-century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre -- that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romanc e-- would have paled somewhat by the year 2002. Over the last year in that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, would by laying down Michael Chabon's Dr. Kavalier and Nurse Clay with a weary sigh and crying out, "Surely, oh, surely, there must be more to the novel than this!"

Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this Gedankenexperiment with "jazz" and "the bossa nova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now, go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."

Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.

And so, the stated goal of this anthology, was to solicit and publish "stories... with plots." I like stories with plots. So, I figured I'd probably like the book, at least if it fulfilled its stated purpose.

Does it? Well, some of the stories do, in spades. Others, not so much. To tell the truth, I almost gave up after the first three stories, which I hated. The first two have plots, technically, but they are not very interesting plots. The third story, "The Bees," by Dan Chanon is nothing but twenty pages of pointless character-torture. Fortunately, the stories got better, and more plot-ful, starting with the fourth one. (This is a problem I've noticed with more than a couple of anthologies-- they start of with some of the worst stories in the book. What's up with that?)

My favorite stories in this collection are the ones which best fulfill the premise: Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" (the title pretty much explains it all), Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary" (an alternate-history detective story wherein Hitler is accused of a murder, and is investigated by an eccentric British detective), Chabon's own "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance" (another alternate history, kind of a steampunk-Wild-West tale), and Nick Hornby's piece, "Otherwise Pandemonium." This last, I think, is the best of the lot, but I can't really describe it without spoiling it. Suffice to say it's a masterpiece of misdirection, and it sent chills down my spine. The Chabon contribution annoyed me a little, because it's just a piece of a longer work. It was good, I liked it alot, but I wanted there to be more of it. In the introduction, he refers to it as a "serialized novel," and I am worried that I'll have to subscribe to McSweeney's if I want to read the rest of it. McSweeney's is expensive, and I am not, generally, a big short-fiction reader in the first place. Maybe it'll be published in a single volume if and when the entire story is completed.

One problem I had with this book is how pointlessly depressing many of the stories are. At least three, maybe four, of the stories seem to have nothing to say to the reader beyond "Existence is misery, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it, it's pointless to even try, the best you can manage is dying," and all that without any even any kind of catharsis to make up for the message. (I say "maybe four" because "The Albertine Files," by Rick Moody, is so bleak and depressing, I stopped reading it. So, I don't know if the bleakness and depression have a point or not.) "Thrilling tales" are not supposed to make the reader want to die, just to escape from the misery of the story.