A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 5, 2020

The stories in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth explore the multitude of ways in which lives are and have been lived, across time and geography, lives that resemble each other only in the experience of  emotions that define human existence. The nine stories cover an astonishing array of subjects, joined only by being set in the past.

Jacob Burke, a brawler known as Muscular, takes on his greatest challenge in “Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw.” Burke and Blindman Ben McGraw fight an epic battle in 1824 that attracts thousands. The story is less about fighting than the reason for fighting: “the reason he hit is that there was joy in hitting, real joy in the simplicity and the freedom and the astounding number of answers in a single movement of his arms.” The story’s attraction, apart from its depiction of grit and determination, is its exploration of good and evil. There is good in all of the story’s pugilists (although Burke wonders “how a hitter could be a good man, and whether he was good only because in the Great Scheme he was on the bottom and he couldn’t be anything else, that if conditions were different, he wouldn’t be so”) because they have open hearts, but there is evil in the men who exploit their pain for profit. This is my favorite story in the collection and it might become one of my all-time favorite short stories.

“The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace” follows a “bug collector, species man” who travels the world observing life. Wallace works out a theory of natural selection that he immediately sends to Darwin, a better known scientist who might be a bit reluctant to acknowledge Wallace’s contribution to the field. Not that recognition matters to Wallace; he is moved by his epiphany, his understanding that when he “looked upon the world,” what he saw “was not life, but life transforming.” In a very different story of a self-sustaining traveler, “The Line Agent Pascal” tells of a man who operates a telegraph station in a remote South American location, joined to humanity only by the daily signals sent by other line agents, a connection that sustains him despite the knowledge that isolated men might die unexpectedly in a multitude of horrible ways.

“For the Union Dead” is narrated by the grandson of immigrants. His American-born father served as a Navy physician in Vietnam while his foreign-born uncle, longed for a connection of his own to America. He found it by playing dead in Civil War reenactments, making a figurative sacrifice that made him feel truly American.

The most playful story adds to an account by Herodotus of an ancient’s Greek’s experiments in child development. A story about raising an asthmatic child in smoke-filled London, when leaches were the preferred cure for most maladies, examines a mother’s devotion to her son.

The last two stories have quasi-religious themes. One is about a female balloonist who, despite being shunned by the male natural scientists of her time, discovers and gives herself up to a rift in the sky. The title story tells of a man in an asylum who is making a registry of his life to share with God, a man who perceives angels and finds hidden connections in the objects he collects.

Some of the stories collected in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth appeal to the intellect more than the heart, but they are all heartfelt in the depth with which the explore the evolving human condition throughout history. The stories are stunningly fresh. Each delivers a nutritious serving of insight and hope. I’ve never read anything quite like them. This is Daniel Mason’s first story collection and the world is richer for it.

RECOMMENDED

Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

Published by Doubleday on March 10, 2020

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an interlocking collection of wry, subversive stories about people who are living absurd lives in Ukraine. The first five take place while the Soviet Union was intact. The last four are post-breakup. Before the fall, people have money but nothing to spend it on. After the fall, there are fifteen brands of sausage but nobody can afford them.

Bureaucrats are the foil of the Soviet-era “Novostroïka.” Daniil’s building has no heat, but when he complains to the town council, they tell him the building does not exist. Deciding that Daniil is wasting the town’s gas by heating the apartment with a stove, the town turns off the gas. At the canning combine, Daniil pretends to work while the combine pretends to pay him. Daniil must go to extreme lengths to prove that his building exists — and perhaps to prove to himself that his own existence is real.

“Little Rabbit” introduces baby Zaya, who has been abandoned or orphaned and thus taken to the baby house. At five, her quirky nature causes the Commission to label her as a defective part in the Soviet machine, so she is sent to a psychoneurological internat for rehabilitation. Zaya, it turns out, is not so easily contained.

A poet in the Kirovka Cultural Club named Konstantin also earns rehabilitation when he is accused of telling a political joke. Since most of the words in the joke have been redacted from the report, the narrator of “Letter of Apology,” who has been assigned to rehabilitate Konstantin, does not know what the joke might have been. The narrator imagines himself destined for the Honor Guard, but after working with Konstantin and his beguiling wife Milena, the narrator will be lucky to keep his job. This is the most amusing story in the collection.

By the time “Miss USSR” takes place, Konstantin is running the Kirovka Cultural Club. He copies the American idea of holding a beauty pageant, but he is reprimanded for allowing an outlandish Ukranian beauty named Orynko to win on grounds that are suspected to be political. Konstantin is ordered to revoke her title, which he neglects to do. When his superior decides to hold a Miss USSR pageant, Konstantin wants to enter Orynko as Miss Ukraine, but she has been sent away. Konstantin recruits Zaya from the internat to stand as her replacement, leading to a bizarre chain of events that turn Konstantin into a local hero.

Konstantin returns in the post-Soviet story “Lucky Toss.” He has now purchased the apartment next to his own, where he displays a saint, charging pilgrims for the privilege of visiting her. He employs the bureaucrat who tried to rehabilitate him as a guard. The story takes a mystical turn after the guard accidentally breaks the saint’s teeth and then his own. “Lucky Toss” is one of only two stories in the book that didn’t appeal to me.

A couple of stories revolve around bootlegs of western record albums that are pressed into x-rays and thus known as “bone records.” “Bone Music” is set in the Soviet era. Smena has the luxury of living alone in a two-room apartment, but might lose it if she is sent to prison for making bootleg recordings of decadent Western rock ‘n’ roll. The post-Soviet story “Roach Brooch” recalls how a grandfather refused to get a tumor removed because its existence entitled him to a free monthly x-ray of his guitar-shaped pelvis. Bone records are even more valuable as post-Soviet memorabilia that tourists love to acquire. The story is ultimately about grandparents who feel abandoned by their children.

Finally, in the post-Soviet “Homecoming,” Zaya returns to the now shuttered internat. Playing interrogator or torturer or prison guard, she works for a business that recreates the experiences of Ivan Denisovich for tourists. The rather tame experience exposes tourists to an experience less harsh than the lives of the homeless people they see from the internat’s windows — until Zaya elevates their terror. The story, the last in the volume, reunites Zaya with Konstantin and gives the collection a sense of closure.

The least satisfying story, “The Ermine Coat,” features Milena as a seamstress who makes an ermine coat for the child of a wealthy Italian. She hopes to earn a commission that will allow her sister and niece to emigrate to Canada, a dream that the niece undermines.

The tragicomic stories in Good Citizens Need Not Fear illuminate life in Ukraine. I was struck by the similarity of living without freedom (during the Soviet days) and living with unbridled freedom (in the post-Soviet version of the Wild West). They are flip sides of the same coin of misery. The Soviet-era stories have more energy and bite, but the collection as a whole gives the reader a sense of the absurdity that characterized Ukrainian life as the nation transitioned from a Soviet to an independent state.

RECOMMENDED

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on May 12, 2020

Sorry for Your Trouble collects stories of loss, usually caused by death or divorce. Many of the characters have ties to Louisiana or Ireland, although Maine and Paris seem to be their preferred vacation destinations. They have generally reached (or at least are approaching) an age that permits sober reflection on mistakes made and reckonings to come.

My favorite entry in this nine-story collection, “Second Language,” is one of the longer ones. After his wife’s sudden death evicts him from his “infallible, magical, irreplaceable world,” a businessman moves from Idaho to New York and meets a divorced woman who feels her life is “composed of some strange, insubstantial paper that she couldn’t quite keep hold of.” They marry, but he depended on his first wife to invent the “workable, reliable mind-set” that made him feel married, and is disappointed that his second wife has a more independent view of partnership. His new wife, on the other hand, understands that her husband “believed in greater and greater closeness, of shared complications, of difficult-to-overcome frictions leading to even greater depths of intimacy and knowledge of each other,” while she simply isn’t that kind of person. Ford dissects the lives and philosophies of the two principal characters, their relationship and its aftermath, exposing hidden barriers to the kind of understanding (of life, ourselves, other people) that we expect or hope to achieve.

I also give high marks to “The Run of Yourself.” After the death of Peter Boyce’s Irish wife, Peter rents a summer house in Maine near the one he and his wife used to rent. He rents a different house — not the one in which his wife died — so he can revisit pleasant memories without being haunted by thoughts of the crusty person his wife became after she fell ill. A visit from his daughter only underscores the distance between them. He has come to realize that he only needs to make small adjustments in his life because, at his age, there is “nothing further to learn or imagine or re-invent.” Doing a favor for a troubled young woman might change his mind about that.

With two exceptions, I enjoyed all of the remaining stories, although to a slightly lesser extent. In “Nothing to Declare,” a relatively young Sandy “nonchalantly loved” Barbara when they traveled to Iceland together, but the emotion was fading by the time he left her there. “She was, he felt, pretentious and self-infatuated. Leaving was a fine idea. What he’d been missing was miss-able. In the stark light her face bore a coarseness he hadn’t noticed, but supposed he would come to dislike.” A couple of decades later, when Sandy kisses Barbara in New Orleans during a chance encounter, Sandy’s feelings are ambiguous, but it isn’t clear that either Sandy or Barbara have fundamentally changed.

The transplanted Irishman in “Happy” dies after living an intellectual’s life. Bobbi “Happy” Kamper, his “surviving paramour,” joins friends for end-of-summer cocktails in Maine, a gathering that represents “a reversion to some way of being that pre-dated everything that life had sadly become.”

In “Displaced,” a 16-year-old boy who lost his father hopes to bond with an older Irish boy, but the friendship only increases his confusion about life. A divorcing American in “Crossing” who encounters brash American tourists in Ireland before he visits with his solicitor wonders whether he would be pathetic if he were to let a tear leak out in remembrance of the past.

In “Jimmy Green — 1992,” the disgraced former mayor of a small Louisiana town winds up in Paris for no particular reason. He watches the results of the American election in an American bar with a French woman and, because of his slight preference for the winning candidate, learns that Americans abroad can be even more obnoxious than Americans at home. The unpleasant episode is easily written off as an inevitable advance in the disassembling of his life.

 “Leaving for Kenosha” struck me as a story of less substance. The friend of the daughter of a divorced man is moving to Kenosha with her family. The divorced man has “a feeling of impendment” as he thinks about his daughter one day growing up and moving away. “A Free Day,” the story I liked the least, briefly follows a woman who is having an affair of convenience.

Ford has achieved a perfection of style, a fluid and harmonious voice that few writers manage with such consistency. His characters have a fundamental decency that allows them to grieve their losses without anger. They are civilized if a bit too restrained for their own good. They aren’t the kind of people who make headlines, for reasons good or bad, but they remind the reader that people who are capable of using their intellect are always striving for a balance of intellect and emotional awareness that is incredibly difficult to achieve.

RECOMMENDED

The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on April 7, 2020

Stories like Kathryn Scanlan's seem to be in vogue in literary circles. They are praised for being astutely observed; whether the observations are worthwhile seems to be less important than the writer’s ability to capture a moment or sensation, or to illuminate or at least illustrate a shared human experience. Plot and characterization are secondary, indeed unimportant, to stories like these.

This is hardly a new trend. In a couple of recent books, Sam Reese quotes an observation that A.L. Balder made in 1945, when he described the (then) “modern short story” as “plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous — frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.” That’s pretty much how I would describe the stories in The Dominant Animal.

I have picked up and put down several story collections in recent years, unable to make it to the end both because the stories seem pointless and because nothing about the way they were written grabbed me. I made it to the end of The Dominant Animal because, although it is packed with stories, each can each be consumed in a minute or two. Many of the stories have an ambiguous meaning. A surgeon who cares about animal rights traps mice that are destroying his expensive cars by using glue boards, inadvertently kills one while trying to free it, and then closes the eyelids of the woman to whom he is relating the story. What’s that all about?

The picnickers in another story eat their hands while waiting for a pig to roast. In her mind, a woman compares baby squirrels to human babies. A man who awakens his neighborhood with a chainsaw every morning is arrested and quickly released, both for reasons unknown. In the title story, a woman disowns a dog that kills her other dog, then goes walking with a man who makes a strange sound. Dying pets and disagreeable men are recurring themes.

Maybe these stories will make more sense to other readers than they did to me. To be fair, I did appreciate a few of the stories. The story I most enjoyed is “Mother’s Teeth,” perhaps because it is slightly longer than the rest. While waiting for her mother’s chemo session to end, a woman eats ice cream and has sex with an elderly man in the locker room of a recreational facility. Later she endures her mother’s criticism, but the ending is happy (in the narrator’s view) because her mother dies.

A story about a woman who brazenly misappropriates another woman’s dog is interesting. So is an ambiguous story about two children who seem to be fending for themselves. A story about a disastrous casino and golfing vacation has something to say about the importance of changing patterns, just like clouds that are “tired of the same old thing.” A story about Scandinavian dieting is amusing. A story about untraining a trained dog would have been amusing but for the darkness that surrounds it.

So that’s about a half dozen of the forty stories in this collection that did anything for me at all. The ratio is just too low to recommend the volume as a whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Weddings by Alexander Chee

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Weddings” is a story of romance and changing times, focusing on a gay character who considers for the first time the possibility of marriage after the Supreme Court prohibits states from banning same-sex weddings. Jack met Scott in college and they became good friends. Jack came out and Scott had sex with him, but Scott otherwise confines himself to dating Asian women. Jack is a Korean-American.

They go their separate ways after college but Jack carries a torch for Scott. The advent of Google makes it possible for Jack to find Scott and renew their friendship, prompting Scott to declare both his love for Jack and the disclosure that Jack is still his only male sex partner. They live on different coasts and their friendship continues, but not in the way Jack would like. Still, he feels special because Scott did not experiment with any other man.

Now in his forties, Jack explains that backstory to Caleb after they attend the wedding of two gay men who have lived together for years and can finally marry. The wedding makes Jack think about Caleb as a potential husband. Jack asks Caleb to another wedding when he learns that Scott is marrying a Korean woman. The wedding gives Jack the opportunity to fret about his inability to speak Korean, about the wedding gossip he hears about Scott’s past, and about his confused mashup of feelings toward Scott and Caleb.

As I read “The Weddings,” I kept wondering whether it was going anywhere. It went to a predictable destination. That isn’t necessarily a complaint — not all stories need to surprise, and predictable endings are often the endings that readers want. The ending is nevertheless anticlimactic, given the drama that Jack builds as he frets about Scott and straight weddings.

The story is nevertheless admirably observant. Jack takes note of wedding customs that he’s never understood and comments on the changing nature of society, both in terms of gay acceptance and in the willingness of Korean-American women to pursue their own lives, rather than the lives their mothers want them to have. On occasion, the story smacks of a Harlequin romance. Sentences like “How long he had wanted to hear something like this” make me cringe. Still, the story is heartfelt and honest, two qualities that largely offset its faults.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS