BiblioAddict

I almost missed this – the Valentine’s Fiction Issue of The Washington Post Magazine, featuring short stories by Julia Alvarez, Stuart Dybek, Walter Kirn, and Julie Orringer. Luckily, I happened to visit American Fiction Notes who kindly pointed it out to his readers. Instead of reading the online versions, I went out and bought a Sunday paper, because I knew myself well-enough to know that I’d prefer the hard-copy if I could get it. These four stories and the story written by last year’s fiction contest winner, Dean Hebert, was well-worth my buck-fifty. It was also a lovely literary way to kick-off Valentine’s Day week.

In “The Road to Cordoba” by Stuart Dybek, a boy hitches a ride with a man who has love’s phone number; he then looses it as easily as he gained it. This is a story on the missed opportunities that pepper our lives, and how, sometimes without even our knowledge, we loose our chance at love before it fully materializes into reality. Dybek is fast becoming one of my favorite short story writers. Remember “We Didn’t”? He has a lovely way at writing about love (he has a lovely way of writing – period), and I think it’s inevitable that I’ll eventually buy his short story collection, I Sailed With Magellan.

“You believe in love at first sight, man. Romantic crap, right? That’s always what I thought, but now I don’t know. Or it’s more like I do know. I know what’s going to happen like it already happened. This snowstorm, the whole city shut down, you know, like destiny man, destiny in a green dress.”
“Verde que te quiero verde,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Lines from a poem.”

In Julie Orringer’s “Ask for Pain” a resentful teenage girl has a secret affair with her soon-to-be step-sister’s secret crush. This story reminded me of another short story I read this week, “Year’s End” by Jhumpa Lahiri in the Winter Fiction Issue (Dec. 24 & 31, 2007) of The New Yorker. In both of these stories a relatively young protagonist suffers the death of a parent: in “Ask for Pain” the girl’s father dies from an aneurysm; in “Year’s End” a college boy’s mother dies from cancer. In both stories the protagonist struggles to accept their parent’s remarriage. Of the two, I liked “Year’s End” more, but “Ask for Pain” showed more of the protagonist’s growth – a growth that comes at the expense of someone who loved her enough to show her how petty she was being.

From “Ask for Pain”:

I wanted to be happy for her, and I told myself I was. She was living her life again. I knew it was what my father would have wanted. But when I saw her with Solomon – watched them kneading bread in the kitchen with Della, or heading off for a hike in Marin or sitting on the sofa with a crossword – all I could think of was that her happiness meant that my father was dead, really dead, and he wasn’t coming back.

From “Year’s End”:

… I could imagine nothing worse than the moment my mother no longer drew air in and out of her lungs, no longer took us in through her weary eyes. I could imagine nothing worse than not being able to look at her face every day, its beauty grossly distorted but never abandoning her. But in the days after my mother’s death I realized that Mrs. Gharibian had been right, there had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come, that the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.

In “The Dictator’s Ex-Wife Writes Him a Letter” by Julia Alvarez aside by her dictator husband gets her revenge and the last word. I’ve never read any of Alvarez’s material, although I’ve blogged about her nonfiction book wife cast One Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA. I should start though. I loved the intertwining touches of loneliness and humor in this story, and of the five stories, I wish this one had gone on for longer than it did.

She was wildly in love. How else could she have opposed her parents’ wishes? She had always been a docile, dreamy girl. Bienvenida Inocencia. Welcome innocence. Her new husband would smile when he pronounced her name. A smile of tender pity, as if she were a child who would someday find out how the world really worked.

“Battle Mountain” by Walter Kirn was the first story I read in the magazine because it was the first one that grabbed me right away. In Kirn’s short story a relationship falls apart on a lonely road in Nevada, and a man wonders if he should leave his girlfriend on the side of the road where she hopped out in a fit of anger:

If you’re a gentleman, you stop the car, but you don’t let her get out and walk no matter what she says, particularly if night is coming on and the nearest town is Elko, Nev., that final frontier of gruesome Western freedom, where brothels operate next to family restaurants, mug shots are legal IDs in liquor stores, and a young woman alone beside the highway may as well do the state patrol a favor by stuffing her underwear in a plastic bag along with her dental records and driver’s license and wrapping herself in yellow crime scene tape.

After that long opening sentence which flows so well that it hardly feels like a run-on, I knew I was going to like Walter Kirn. And I did, and I do. I’ve already Wishlisted Kirn’s short story collection My Hard Bargain. If this is anything like the romance I’m having with Dybek right now, I sense the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Finally, I read “Love is Kryptonite” by last year’s winner of the fiction contest, Dean Hebert. Apparently, this is the first story Hebert, an adviser and teacher at the University of Maryland, has ever had published. I must say, you could have fooled me, because this story was excellent. It smoothly fit in with the excellent company it kept. In “Love is Kryptonite” a love-sick man imagines himself as superman and gives his beloved a secret gift that destroys her marriage:

So, what do you do if you’re Superman, and you love Lois, but she’s already found herself a great guy and married him? The smart thing would be to keep your mouth shut. I wasn’t that smart. I told her that I loved her. It was a line I shouldn’t have crossed, I know. But I thought if that’s all it was, just me telling her how I felt, without asking anything of her, that maybe it would be okay. And it sort of was. When I told her I loved her, all she said was, “I know.” This only made me love her more.

I sincerely hope that, though this is the first story Hebert has had published, it will not be the last.

What was amazing about all of these stories (besides their excellent writing) is that they – the writers – were instructed to base their stories around various photos. Just thinking about how these writers created lives and stories from a picture put me in awe of the creative process and the awesome power of writers all over again. Writers who can spin a good yarn – you can be my Valentine any day of the year.