Final Vinyl Days: And Other Stories [Hardcover]

Jill McCorkle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1998

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning of new life by visiting with a very old neighbor who's waiting, too, for his own new life. In these and the rest of the nine stories, Jill McCorkle acts on her penchant for taming the outrageous, humanizing the forbidden, and grounding the hilarious.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With titles such as "Dysfunction 101," "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us," and "It's a Funeral! RSVP," it's clear that when you open Jill McCorkle's Final Vinyl Days, you're not signing up for Remembrance of Things Past. Still, if Proust grew up in the newly air-conditioned South, listening to Marvin Gaye and sneaking contraband cigarettes in the local graveyard, who knows, he might have produced tales like these. Garrulous, earthy, and firmly grounded in the most mundane details of life, McCorkle's stories strain at the edges of their slight plots. The pleasure here lies mostly in listening to these voices run on--and they do run on, in monologues both withering and affectionate. "He was real handsome, when he was all cleaned up, but I couldn't stop thinking of his head as a maraca, like the ones I loved to shake in elementary school; he had little tiny specks of information rolling around in his head and making enough sound that he didn't seem like a zombie," one narrator recalls of an old boyfriend. McCorkle is a master of both the properly placed italic and the telling pop-culture detail; the mistress of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" announces, "I'm the test wife and he tries everything on me first, I mean everything. Remember when he got hooked on the massage oil that heats up with body temp? Now maybe you liked it, but I sure didn't. I got a rash, but of course, I have extremely sensitive skin and always have. I mean, I am Clinique all the way." Not all of these stories are funny--the divorced mother of "A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World," for instance, runs on little more than fear and adrenaline--but even those that are have strong undercurrents of tragedy. The narrator of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" wryly trashes her own big "peasant" feet, tells the wife to make her husband behave, confesses her loneliness, then makes herself disappear: "But don't let him off easy. Pitch a blue blazing fit. Scream, curse, throw things. Let him have it, honey. Your husband is cheating on us. Let him have it. And when all is said and done, please just forget that I was ever here; that I ever walked the earth. After all, I'm Big Foot. Who knows if I even exist." Divorce, sibling rivalries, missing parents, and deathbed advice: only McCorkle could shine a light into these dark corners of the human heart with such good grace and wit. --Mary Park

From Kirkus Reviews

Nine varied, lively, and beguiling stories from the ever-improving author of, most recently, Carolina Moon (1996). If you still think southern fiction is all about decaying antebellum mansions, miscegenation, and disturbing family secrets, you owe it to yourself to read McCorkle. Not that she shuns such mattersit's just that her amiably unstrung characters keep reminding us that, even while psyches and marriages are collapsing, dishes pile up in the sink, and sometimes dirty laundry is, well, just clothes that have to be washed and hung on the line. She's wonderful with beleaguered or comically resourceful women: a pregnant one trying to quit smoking and shape up generally (``Life Prerecorded''); an entrepreneur who markets funerals for ``the soon-to-be deceased'' (``It's a Funeral! RSVP''); and, most memorably, a single mother obsessed with her own and her young son's vulnerability (``A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World''). If McCorkle stumbles with a monologue addressed by a man's mistress to his wife (``Your Husband Is Cheating On Us''), suggesting the two murder him together, she shines when widening her lens to examine (``Paradise'') the seriocomic chemistry between a New York Jew (Adam) and an Atlanta fashion designer (Eve) hung up on ``the North-South thing,'' or a young clergyman's uncertain ministry (``The Anatomy of Man''). She has a deadly eye for endearingly ludicrous detail (weddings and funerals bring out her best), a genius for piquant first-person narration, and a finely tuned ear for the accents of exasperated domesticity (``If Jesus were here he would take that child outside and wear his butt out''). Her stories meander even when they're comparatively tightly plottedbut its always a pleasure staying with them just to hear her people rattle on. The work of an accomplished comic writer whos continually refining her skills and expanding her range. McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (January 6, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565122046
• ISBN-13: 978-1565122048
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,369,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars she's not as original, nor as funny as before, January 29, 2001

By 

anibani (Cambridgeshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Final Vinyl Days (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

I love short stories, and I really enjoyed Jill McCorkle's "Crash Diet", as well as her first novel "The Cheerleader". But "Final Vinyl Days", a collection of stories mostly about unhappy/problematic people who either rationalize or realize that their life isn't so bad (that seems to be the universal plot), doesn't live up to those two other books. Her characters don't have the energy her older characters used to have. And several of them tend to reminisce about their past too much -- it's one digression after another and the stories slowly move. There isn't enough variation among the characters/stories either, they all seem to be written in very similar tones/moods/personalities. This isn't one of her works that I would recommend buying.

However, one of her best stories (in my opinion) is in this book, "Life Prerecorded". It is realistic, doesn't depend on weird circumstances to make a plot, and is full of insight (also appears in "Writer's Harvest2" which is a better buy, I think). A good interview with McCorkle also appears at the end of "Final Vinyl Days".

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars eclectic mix, but not as good as her novels, August 15, 2000

By 

M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Final Vinyl Days (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

Having been a fan of McCorkle's writing since July 7th, I found this collection just a bit disappointing overall although there were some excellent stories (Final Vinyl Days, Your Husband is Cheating on Us, It's a Funeral, RSVP). Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that in her novels, the quirky characters have a chance to be fleshed out more and grow on us. In a short story, sometimes these odd characters sound gimmicky and 2 dimensional. Still, there are several scenes that will make you laugh out loud and some characters are very well sketched. Overall, these stories are solid, but if you have not read anything by McCorkle before, it may be better to start with July 7th and then try some of her short stories.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What first seemed colorful, now seems trite., September 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Final Vinyl Days: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

When I first encountered Jill McCorkle's writing, the depth and humor of her characters struck me. However, after reading all of her novels and this, her second book of short stories, I am struck by how the same "quirky" people keep popping up in different disguises. Surely someone with an imagination as vivid as McCorkle doesn't need to recycle her characters and can give us something more interesting than these caricatures? I am very disappointed, and hope that these past two works of McCorkle's don't represent a trend.