Customer Reviews

Famous Fathers & Other Stories

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Pia Z. Ehrhardt's stories are a pleasure to read, even when the people (and they feel like people, not characters) are suffering. She understands the mistakes we make, and the sometimes clumsy gestures we offer, afterwards. Her stories, mostly set in New Orleans, are lush and atmospheric, but the focus is always on the heart. Ehrhardt is too honest to offer easy solutions--she understands that love is a serious, messy business--but she honors the effort. Each story arrives fully bloomed--the shorter stories work as glimpes, broken snapshots--but her longer stories, like Alice Munro's, carry the emotional weight of novels. Forgiveness is everything. My favorites are "Driveway" and "The Longest Part of the Day," but every story here, every sentence, is a hard-won gift.

Do not be fooled into thinking the female protagonists in this knock-out debut are passive. They are not.

This is not the 19th century--there is no awakening. This woman is not about to head into the ocean. She's already there, already reborn, and she's taken charge. She's in control. She's got her own place and she's generous with her freedom.

But like the levee, the reservoir, the water tower, the bridges--she is contained, but just barely. And the men who believe they are restraining her, who believe they have the upper hand, aren't and don't. Even in the waterless landscape--the desert--she remains in control, because after all she lives. She rises again like Lazarus--and she is her own Jesus (not the fellow who gives her a ride to the hospital. He's made to seem important, but we know she would have lived whether he came along or not).

Like the levees we are all so familiar with now in the post-Katrina world, if you make the wrong move, if you push her too far, the woman will break free. She will flood her restraints--she will take over your streets, your house. She will send you fleeing from the city you love. But she doesn't do this in these stories--she keeps herself as much in check as she can stand. And why? Well, for love. Love is the ultimate prize, the gift. She will do just about anything for love--and truthfully she finds getting it from men easy enough.

So what is she seeking then? What is it that drives her? The key is in her relationships with other women--the mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, other wives--living and dead. These are the people who have power over her. These are the relationships that are tricky, that require finesse. These are the relationship which frustrate and devastate and maybe even leave her feeling powerless, though not beaten. She will keep at it, keep trying to understand because that is what will bring some relief to the hurt: empathy.

The famous fathers? Well, they're really just a way to try to understand the distant mother--the one whose high-heeled footsteps you hear echoing on the floors down below you--walking away, loud on wood, on tile, and muted with carpet. But always--always--with the father following behind, and the daughter left to wonder if she will ever return.

An absolutely smashing collection which will leave you with Ehrhardt's powerful and confident voice ringing in your ears. If you are anything like me, you'll find yourself dog earing every other page so that you can go back and read a certain passage again, relish it. These stories will grab onto you and not let go anytime soon--and you won't want them to.

Read it.

A character in one of these short stories expresses herself by quoting famous people, and as I neared the end of this outstanding collection, I thought of General Sherman's observation, "It is well that war is so terrible--or men would love it too much." These stories seem to say "It is just as well that adultery is so terrible, or men and women would love it too much." Except for the very first one, these stories are beautiful and true. The most attractive and characteristic element of Pia Ehrhardt's writing is her unique voice and narrative persona, which is simultaneously energetic, observant, sensitive, sensuous as well as sensual, and honest, but also cold, ruthless, matter-of-fact, skittering along the edge of deception and self-deception (but almost always saved by the authorial consciousness floating above), and deeply funny. Being funny requires a writer to maintain perspective, and an often painfully honest perspective also generates the honesty in the voice and narrative persona of these stories. Nietzsche couldn't resist cheap shots, and he wrote things he knew to be untrue just because they were witty, but in the imaginative world of FAMOUS FATHERS, humour is always true, always honest, always cleansing--even if having alcohol poured over an open wound hurts like hell. The short story, FAMOUS FATHERS makes me realise, is the perfect form for depicting adultery--a drama of concentrated choice, a fateful act, the fulfillment of a doomed wish. There is no future to adultery, because if there is, it becomes something else. Is it a coincidence that some of the greatest works of literature have adultery as the mainspring of their plots--THE ILIAD, the AGAMEMNON of Aeschylus, the story of David and Bathsheba (and poor Uriah the Hittite), MADAME BOVARY, and ANNA KARENINA? These works all go on to explore other aspects of life, but Ehrhardt stays intensely focused on adultery itself, and her fascination, her attraction to it, and her honesty make these stories extremely compelling. The range and depth of Ehrhardt's treatment of the subject can be seen in excerpts from two stories. The story "Stop" closes with a beautifully seductive image of the momentary freedom and joy that adultery offers: "Try to forget that jumping-on-a-tramopoline feeling, when life is the top of the bounce, and the view up there is scary and crazy and sweet. The two of you with your hair flying, his unbuttoned shirt caping behind him, and eight feet of air under your feet." But these, and other passages describing the attractions of adultery are balanced by the deeper truth revealed in the story "How it Floods", in the context of a character's child: "I pray that he falls in love the way other people fall in love, where it's just a gift offered by a man and a woman at about the same time, where their hearts are flying toward one another, sure and scared." Unlike the primitive and emotionally stunted content of "Adult" entertainment fare, these stories really are for adults, for those willing to humbly, honestly, and observantly read about, and reflect on, the inexplicable, and finally unknowable, desires of the human heart.

This is the best kind of book in that I felt I was invited into each of these character's minds and hearts. The people in these stories are brave, messed-up, loving, self-aware, forgiving, and honest even when they're being dishonest. One of the best collections I've read--ever.

FAMOUS FATHERS by Pia Z. Ehrhardt. Wow! Winner of the Narrative Prize, Pia Z. Ehrhardt creates landscapes of the physical world and the heart that are equally vivid, lush and invigorating. As adept with universal human understanding as she is with the wild, uncontrolled, and brilliant nature of the feminine, Ehrhardt's authorial light infuses her stories and sends readers into the space of the forbidden, a liminal encounter with secrecy, intimacy, loyalty, and power. With stories in McSweeney's, Narrative Magazine, Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and Wild Strawberries, her work evokes the pursuit of self and other in a contemporary fusion of that which is at once female and daunting. This is a marvelous story collection by a proven writer with precise and luminous prose. Go buy it right now!

As a prelude to her stories, Pia Ehrhardt quotes Robert Lowell, saying, "Yet why not say what happened?" The implication, of course, is that saying what happened is what we avoid. Not so Ehrhardt, whose stories take an unflinching look at heartbreaking moments, situations, relationships and choices that life dishes out. From "A Man," where a maimed rape victim tries to find consolation in her rescuer, to the provocative adolescent sexuality of "Famous Fathers," Ehrhardt refuses to back down. This is what life is like, her stories say. Deal with it. Even better is the way Ehrhardt says 'what happened.' Her sentences are taut and elegant. Her observations are both funny and judicious. Her characters don bear suits, and trespass to climb water towers--broaching intimacies at dizzying heights. This is a debut that not only faces down life, it entertains, so we can face it, too. Read it.

Beautifully written stories that explore relationships; the difficulty of maintaining them and the quagmires created with a breakup. To some extent we are all messed up and we have all made bad decisions and questionable choices. We've all felt stuck. Ms. Ehrhardt doesn't ask us to pity her characters, most of whom are cheating on their husbands or thinking about cheating, but to understand the complexities of the human heart.

Not since David Sedaris' Holidays on Ice has a book made me laugh this much.