Night Hawks by Charles Johnson

Published by Scribner on May 1, 2018

Many of the stories in Night Hawks address questions of religion or philosophy. Toshiro Ogami, the “imitation priest” in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra,” left the monastery because he did not have the political or family connections needed to rise in his religion. He translates English books into Japanese while rehabilitating an old, abandoned temple. An African American woman whose book he is translating finds him there. Quite inadvertently, she helps him overcome his self-doubt and find the harmonious unity that has always eluded him.

“Idols of the Cave” is told in the second person, putting the reader in the shoes of a Muslim American soldier who is being court martialed after tumbling into a cave in Afghanistan that had once been occupied by Buddhist monks. A treasure trove of ancient wisdom sparks a discussion between the Muslim soldier and a Christian major and an outcome that Aristotle might categorize as either comedy or tragedy — the court martialed soldier does not know which characterization would be more accurate.

“The Weave” describes the theft of wigs and extensions made from human hair from a salon by a former employee who believes she was unjustly fired for burning a customer. The hair comes from the heads of Buddhist women who are shorn in order to let go of all things cosmetic. The story, narrated by the thief’s boyfriend, is about letting go of the things that turned the former salon employee into a thief, including her pain and “the absurdities of color and caste.”

A student of Socrates, presumably Plato, narrates “The Cynic.” He laments the condition of postwar Athens, the prevalence of people who aspire to power rather than good, who learn from sophists how to disguise truth and perfection, and at the same time challenges the wisdom of Socrates, Aristotle, and particularly Diogenes, who forces Plato to consider the possibility that it is more important to be than to understand.

Other stories are closer to home, but are still informed by philosophy, particularly by Buddhist thought. A Seattle cab driver in “Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” ruminating about the unfair divide between the 1% and the rest of us, burglarizes the home of a wealthy man, only to learn that the differences between the rich and poor are often less significant that the suffering that all human beings share. A similar lesson is learned in “Welcome to Westwood,” when the narrator, irritated by the loud music played by a neighbor, learns to replace his irritation with compassion.

“The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” is a fictionalized account of the narrator’s encounter with a real-life black man in Seattle who gained some fame by dressing as a superhero and fighting (or, as the police viewed it, committing) crimes. The point of the story is that people have the power to invent themselves, perhaps the most important superpower of all.

Another real-life African American, the playwright August Wilson, is the subject of “Night Hawks,” a story written as a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the soul of the artist, the difference between tough exteriors and sensitive interiors, “the ambiguous state of black America,” and the tragedy of art that never reaches the audience that most needs to see it. Reality intrudes on intellectualism when the two men observe the night hawks who roost at an IHOP at 3 a.m., a juxtaposition that suggests the importance of art as a refuge from the violence and suffering that surrounds us all.

The remaining inhabitants of Earth in “4189” are immortal, but some of them use a forbidden drug that helps them imagine they might die, which is essential to appreciating a moment of time. But death, the only forbidden fruit, becomes the only taste that Shane and his lover crave. This story is about a society that subordinates individuality for the collective good. With its surprise ending, this is one of the best science fiction short stories I’ve read this year.

A song that contains a map to freedom for runaway slaves is at the center of “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” On the silly side, “Guinea Pig” describes an experiment in which a student briefly inhabits the mind of the researcher’s dog.

All of Charles Johnson’s stories are carefully polished gems. This collection demonstrates Johnson’s versatility, blending philosophy with the reality of modern street life. It is the product of a warm, generous, and thoughtful mind, the kind of enriching fiction that offers a chance to take a break and feel grateful for life and for artists who help us understand the possibilities it offers.

RECOMMENDED

Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin

Published by Random House on March 6, 2018

Bring Out the Dog is an uneven collection of war stories told by the same narrator and generally featuring the same characters. Some stories take place while the combatants are training; others take place in Iraq or Afghanistan. My impression is that Will Mackin followed the model of other war writers without reflecting deeply on his own experiences, or at least without translating that reflection into soul-searching fiction.

It is a staple of war fiction that fighters in the field believe they know more than commanders who occupy desks. When Mackin writes, “As Seal Team Six . . . [o]ur ideas about the war were the war,” his narrator’s hubris reflects a common mindset in war fiction. The best war stories, as exemplified by The Things They Carried, explore the strengths and weaknesses of combatants and the horror of war without being self-aggrandizing. Macen occasionally reaches that pinnacle, but many of the stories in Bring Out the Dog fall short. Too many strained similes (“Static poured out of its speaker like sugar”) come across as ill-advised attempts to be literary. At his best, Mackin tells his stories in a natural voice. At his worst, he’s pretentious.

The best story, “The Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night,” is about a dog’s funeral, but it is also about two enduring themes of war fiction: fear and futility. Another story that gains strength from its honesty, “Rib Night,” talks about soldiers who become addicted to sleeping pills so they can forget about the people they killed. One soldier in particular makes a point of being a testosterone-driven asshole who clearly joined the service so that he could kill people. He takes the pills for fun and doesn’t seem interested in forgetting the deaths he caused.

One of the better stories isn’t really a war story at all, although it might explain something about the mindset that drives men to volunteer for combat. “Baker’s Strong Point” deals with the narrator’s friend, who hangs out with a stripper when he and the narrator aren’t practicing their skills in the Utah desert. The stripper’s unfortunate boyfriend has an encounter with the soldier and his baseball bat when he wonders whether the stripper might be cheating on him.

Many of Mackin’s themes are common in war fiction, including the boredom that combatants share when they aren’t in combat. “The Lost Troop” is about the things a bored soldier imagines (the war is over and nobody told them, an asteroid is about to wipe out all life on the planet) before he and his troop find a spot to scatter the ashes of a soldier who died. To cope with boredom, the troop pays a visit to their interpreter’s mean grade school teacher and recites the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, an act that hardly seems destined to win the hearts and minds of Afghanis. The story is probably the most creative effort in the collection.

On the other hand, boredom is never something that a writer should inflict on a reader. “Welcome Man Will Never Fly” starts out with a former pilot and current Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) who is training a SEAL to be a JTAC, a job the SEAL is clearly incapable of learning. If the story has a point, I missed it. I finished “Kattekoppen,” about a rescue mission for kidnapped soldiers that focuses on whether a Dutch soldier will “fit in,” with a similar sense that I had read a collection of events and thoughts in search of a unifying purpose.

Other stories that didn’t do much for me essentially focused on the rituals of combat without providing any unusual insight into the characters’ lives or the lives of those with whom they interacted. One story involved bombing a fire truck on the practice range, and its only point seemed to be that a fire truck is an odd choice of targets. “Crossing the River No Name” muddles up the usual memes of war fiction (religion, football, camaraderie, risk) but the memes never add up to a coherent point.

“Remain Over Day” is mostly about bickering. “Yankee Two” is about bickering between soldiers who debate their failure to kill a twelve-year-old, apparently accepting as a given that nobody should feel bad about killing a twelve-year-old. “Backmask” explains that the code word for women is “feathers” because, I guess, calling them women would be recognizing that they are human beings — a thought that could have been profitably explored, but the story is mostly about breaking down doors and conversing with wild dogs.

In the end, a few of the stories in this collection show promise, but most come across as “I have war experience so I should write war fiction, even if I don’t know what I want to say.”

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

My Purple Scented Novel by Ian McEwan

First published in 2016; published by Vintage on June 19, 2018

“My Purple Scented Novel” is a short story of literary evil, the worst kind of evil imaginable in the world of serious literature: plagiarism. Two lifelong friends have known each other since college. Both are writers. One turned out to be successful. The other had children. Eventually, the world believes that one stole a novel from the other, and in fact that’s what happened, but the theft is not what it appears to be.

The reader might wonder what motivated the evil writer to act as he did. Jealousy? He denies it. A desire for wealth and fame? He claims to be content with a drafty house, a professorship that is dragging its way to tenure, and a legacy of out-of-print novels. But given his fiendish conduct, the reader might be disinclined to believe a word he says.

Maybe the evil deed is something that Ian McEwan could imagine himself doing if not for the talent that assured he would never be a mid-list, out-of-print author. Perhaps all great writers are a bit evil, at least in their imaginations.

Perhaps the point of the story is not so much the writer’s motivation as the deed itself, the audacity of behaving in such a selfish way and getting away with it. If it weren’t so awful, the display of chutzpah would almost be admirable.

“My Purple Scented Novel” was first published in the New Yorker and is now available as a Vintage Short. It is quite short, but McEwan fans who don’t want to read it (or listen to McEwan read it) on the New Yorker website now have the option of downloading it to a reading gadget. The story is worth a reader’s time regardless of how the reader decides to experience it.

RECOMMENDED

The Price of the Haircut by Brock Clarke

Published by Algonquin Books on March 13, 2018

The Price of the Haircut is a collection of tragicomic (or in a few cases, twistedly comic) stories that blend humor with perception. After the mayor in “The Price of the Haircut” tells the city that a race riot wasn’t caused by yet another shooting of an unarmed black man by a white cop, but by a quarrel over a barber’s racist remark after he gave an $8 haircut, the white narrator and his friends lament all the bad but expensive haircuts they’ve had. They want to save money and get a bad haircut for only $8, but can they patronize a barber who makes racist remarks? The frivolous logic they employ to wrestle with their moral dilemma is hilarious, but the story’s larger point concerns the willingness of white people to pretend that racism doesn’t exist while agreeing that if it did exist, it would be awful, a point they would happily make in a patronizing and self-congratulatory way to their black friends if they had any.

In the volume’s most bizarre story, “Our Pointy Boots,” young men and women ask the question: “How does the thing that promises to be different, the thing that promises to make you feel good, end up making you feel as bad as everything else?” After they return from war (except for the one who died), the same young men and women just want to march around the Public Square in the pointy boots they thought would make them feel good. This is a tragically funny story that lampoons all the clichés about returning veterans and reminds us that people are individuals, not clichés. Ultimately the story is about the importance of holding onto something that makes us feel good during all those times when feeling good seems very far away. And it’s about the importance of holding onto ourselves if all else fails.

In “The Pity Palace,” a man in Italy is too sad to venture outside of his home because his wife left him for Mario Puzo. After jettisoning the friends who warned him that he needs to go outside if he wants to keep his friends, he has no one to take care of him, compounding his desperate loneliness. His former friends have circulated flyers inviting people to visit the man’s home, which they have dubbed “The Pity Palace,” in order to pity him. Feeling pity for the man makes visitors feel better about their own lives (except for those who complain that he isn’t pitiful enough), which says something sad but honest about human nature. The story’s kicker lies in the growing realization that the man is even more pitiful than he appears to be.

“What Is the Cure for Meanness?” should be a sad story told by a young boy about his mean father and emotionally wrecked mother, and while it is a sad story, it’s also very funny. The son is trying to avoid his father’s meanness and is only partially successful, although he’s more insensitive than mean to his mom. But their life is filled with misfortune — everything the mother cares about dies or leaves — and maybe meanness is the natural response. Still, as the title suggests, meanness might not be inevitable.

The narrator of “Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife” is a research-obsessed husband who is afraid to lose his wife to her congenital heart defect and is instead losing her to his inability to give her the space she needs. That doesn’t sound funny, and it’s not, but the tour of Lizzie Borden’s house (which frat boys have mistaken for porn star Lezzie Borden’s house) is hysterical.

“The Misunderstandings” is narrated by an unemployed man whose takes his unhappy family to dinners at local restaurants, each leading to misunderstandings that lead to more family dinners at other restaurants, all paid for by restaurant owners in sort of a “pay it forward” spirit. Speaking of family dinners, one of my favorite stories in the volume is “That Which We Will Not Give,” a celebration of family stories that are repeated every year at Thanksgiving dinners and other barbaric family rituals.

“The Grand Canyon” is a five-page run-on sentence that describes a moment in a woman’s honeymoon when she considers how to paint the Grand Canyon and whether the painting should include her husband masturbating into it. “Children Who Divorce,” a story about jealousy, imagines that child actors reunite to act in updated, dinner theater versions of their original productions, minded by a doctor who tends to the actors with daily group therapy sessions (the current group suffers from Gene Wilder withdrawal).

Brock Clarke has a knack for creating strange — sometimes bizarre — situations or characters, and finding within them those things that are common to us all. The stories encourage readers not just to laugh, but to understand people and their lives in new ways, to understand how other people are, in fundamental ways, just like us, not matter how unlike us they might be.

RECOMMENDED

American Histories by John Edgar Wideman

Published by Scribner on March 20, 2018

American Histories is John Edgar Wideman’s new story collection. The four stories I’ll first mention here are masterful. The others are quite good, and the volume as a whole is another tribute to an important American writer who crafted a style that is uniquely his own. In a couple of the stories, Wideman describes his writing as unimportant, as compared to the things that smarter people do. I hope Wideman understands that his work is not just important: it’s vital.

“Williamsburg Bridge” is narrated by a man standing on the bridge where Sonny Rollins used to play his sax. The improvisational nature of jazz, its controlled chaos, fuels this story. The man has shed nearly all of his clothes and is preparing to jump, or not. He equates death with freedom, although he wonders if the bridge cops might shoot him before he has a chance to kill himself, taking away his freedom to choose, as freedom has so often been taken from people of color. He catalogs the many reasons he might want to commit suicide, but none are his motivation. It isn’t clear whether he even understands why he might choose to die, or to live. He hears “that question — why? —drum-drum drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I was able to produce.” He asks the reader whether you’re grateful that it’s his turn, not yours, at the edge. The story plays with images of color, from skin color to whitespace to colors in the East River ranging “from impenetrable oily sludge to purest glimmer.” (Edges and color are among several recurring themes in these stories.)

“Maps and Ledgers” is about families and hard times, the family histories that people don’t talk about — the father who killed a man, the son sentenced to life in prison, the grandmother with serial husbands. Bad things happen and the only thing you can count on is that life will get worse. Black and white families live apart, interacting but not really. The narrator speaks white English to whites and black English at home in his segregated neighborhood, in a society divided by laws and power that serves itself. “Don’t let the ugly take you down” the narrator’s mother says, and that’s the story’s lesson, but the lesson is easier to say than to live.

“JB & FD” are John Brown and Frederick Douglas, two men who tried to free America from the oppression of slavery. Told as an imagined conversation or correspondence over time, the story is about their fundamental agreements and disagreements, their differing strategic approaches to abolishing slavery. Douglas wishes to offer his life, not his death, to his people. Brown is convinced that an armed raid on Harper’s Ferry will spark a slave rebellion that makes the risk of death worth taking. Both men believe that change must come. The story ends with the rambling narrative of another John Brown, the son of Jim Daniels, who was rescued from slavery by John Brown and named his son after the man who gave him freedom. Wideman’s story reminds us that freedom is too precious to waste.

“Nat Turner’s Confession” takes on the controversial “confession” that Thomas Gray claimed to have received from Nat Turner. Most of Wideman’s story, like William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, is told in the first person from Turner’s perspective (“I am called Nat Turner, a name made up for the convenience of sellers and purchasers of me”), providing an alternative to the “confession” that Gray likely fabricated, at least in part. But other voices intrude in Wideman’s story, including Turner’s mother (representing the tribulations of all enslaved women) and a confession by Nate Parker (who made a movie about Nat Turner several years after being acquitted of rape). Wideman imagines Turner having a love/hate relationship with white people, a fear that he will miss them if he kills them all, a belief that “until they are gone, we will not truly cleanse ourselves of the belief that we are nothing without them.” Like many of Wideman’s stories, this one overflows with the joy of language and its rhythms.

Most of Wideman’s stories are deeply personal. “New Start” uses an aging couple watching Downtown Abbey to ask whether all our lives are performance, whether we need an audience of at least one to make them real. Our lives are stories, true stories “until we tumble out of them and then they are different and true again,” the ending unwritten and feared. In “Examination,” a visit to the doctor’s office triggers a riff on edges and democracy and social constructs and death, real and imagined. “The Writing Teacher” is about a professor, very much like Wideman, who tries to help students understand that their stories won’t appeal to every reader and that their fiction probably won’t change an intransigent and unfair world, admirable though it is to want to topple empires or to expose naked emperors. (Empires are another recurring theme.)

“Dark Matter” is about the things people discuss over dinner, but more importantly, it’s about the fact that friends go out to dinner and discuss things. “Shape the World Is In” is a monologue by a guy who is thinking about life as he sits on the toilet. “Yellow Sea” is about the evil in the world that keeps the narrator awake at night.

“My Dead” is more a contemplation of Wideman’s dead relatives than a story, but it is also a contemplation of mortality, of the impudence of life and the arbitrariness of death, of the recognition that only after people die do we really begin to give their lives the full consideration they deserve. “Bonds” is a sweet story about a woman who struggles not to give birth on an unlucky day to a child who will have enough bad luck being born into poverty and prejudice.

A few of the stories are sketches or vignettes. They discuss lines and names and death, the way things change and don’t, the divisions of people within an empire, the whiteness of snow. All of them are interesting, although I would classify some as essays rather than stories. A longer essay in the form of fiction imagines conversations between Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the end, it doesn’t matter how these pieces are categorized, because good writing has value for its own sake, and American Histories is a collection of very good writing.

RECOMMENDED