33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ron Carlson, My Hero, July 1, 2005
This review is from: A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (Paperback)
I've always loved endings. I'm fascinated by the way a story becomes itself, gathers force, and then, just as critical mass is reached, powers down. My favorite stories crimp like that, right as their full trajectories become visible; like being in a car that's just screeched to a halt, a good story leaves you rocking in your seat, armhairs on end from unrealized intertia. So, by mathematics alone, I'm a sucker for story collections: with a novel, you only get one ending; with a collection, you get the whole quiver. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the grand vision of the novel, and it's true that a story collection will never have the voltage of novels like Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy or Beloved by Toni Morrison. But remember: it's the amperage that kills. Pure electricity are stories like Stuart Dybek's "Paper Lantern," Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here," Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," Robert Stone's "Helping," or Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Point." You could light the sky with the story-power of Robert Olen Butler or Alice Munroe, two of our best practitioners. And with Tobias Wolff's prose, you could weld. But the writer who first influenced me, and has continued to influence me most through my career is Ron Carlson, a true writer's writer. His first three short story collections-The News of the World, Plan B for the Middle Class and Hotel Eden-have recently been published in one volume, A Kind of Flying.
For a book to take up residence inside of you, so that it influences you from within, it's either got to hit you at the right time in your life or be rich enough that future readings reveal new, deeper meanings. For me, Ron Carlson's stories did both-his work became that length of rope you tie around your waist before entering a cave: no matter what adventures or perils awaited, everything would lead back through that safety line to the place you started and the sense of security that allowed you to take a risk. Carlson's stories were my permission, my proof of possibility and my way back when I got lost.
I first came across Carlson's stories in the late 80s. I'd been playing hooky from life-working construction, hanging out with people who took Jimmy Buffet literally-so when I finally decided to grow up and go to college, I had to face some of the reasons it had been appealing to lead an incurious life of worktrucks and weekends in Mexico. This is when I came across Carlson's story "The Governor's Ball," about a man who voluntarily does dirty work so he can avoid the emotional work of connecting to his wife. Instead of joining her for an important function, the narrator spends the evening taking a mattress to the dump, and the whole time he drove around his fictional town, I was thinking, I know what's eating at that guy, I know what he's not talking about! Then I stumbled upon "DeRay" in GQ. Here the narrator covets the life of his neighbor DeRay, a man the narrator perceives to possess far greater abilities than himself. I looked up from my magazine in quad of Arizona State and studied all the students who had been intimidating me. I said to the narrator, Man, why can't you see all the good things you've got going on. Perhaps these sound like naïve reading experiences, but a good story, one that points out personal truths, always makes a child out of me.
I suddenly wanted to write a story, too, one in which the character doesn't have to say what he's feeling because it's obvious in his decisions, observations, descriptions. If only everyone could be read that way, I thought. If only I could read myself so easily. So I took a fiction workshop (I also needed an easy "A") and I had a surprising experience: all of my supposed flaws-daydreaming, rubbernecking, pointless lying, compulsive exaggeration-combined to make something good: storytelling. It was one of those rare moments in which I knew what I wanted my destiny to be. I wanted what Ron Carlson had: the ability to tell a story deeply enough that every reading yielded something new. That kind of story didn't have a single ending, but many of them. The secret ingredient, I think I've figured out, is wisdom. I don't think I have that kind of large understanding of human behavior yet, but it's a pretty good destiny to aim for.
I recently picked up a book that had spoken to me as a teenager. But perusing its pages again, I was left flat. The young man who'd loved that book was no more, and the book had little to offer the person I'd become. It's true that I couldn't have encountered Carlson's stories at a better time-I soon tore through everything he'd written, relishing other stories like "Blazo," "Nightcap" and "Oxygen"-and I realized that his work has such a scope that there couldn't be a better time for anybody to encounter his work. His stories are so agile of voice, broad of heart, and deeply layered, that there's something in them for everyone. You couldn't bearhug stories like "The Hotel Eden" and "Dr. Slime" into the same pages of another author's book, but Carlson does it again and again. The deluded whimsy of a story like "Bigfoot Stole My Wife" somehow fits next to the deflected seriousness of "Life Before Science."
Carlson's stories are famous among writers for their humor, warmth and relentless attention to the human heart. In his narrator's voices, you can hear exactly what they wish they could tell you. In their actions you can see what they truly yearn for. Carlson just seems to know about people, real and invented. He knew me as a lost construction worker, though he'd never met me. And he knew me as a college student, a struggling writer, and now he knows what I'm experiencing as a full-fledged grown up. It turns out the first story I read by Carlson was "Milk," in which a new father must confront the vulnerabilities of becoming a parent in a dangerous world. I reread that story when my son was born and again this summer when my daughter arrived. Like all of Carlson's work, when I read it at different points in my life, it had a different ending: mine.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reasonable Hope - the kind that we try to live by, July 17, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (Paperback)
Ron Carlson writes wonderful stories, a celebrated master of the short story form because he peoples his work with characters who dare not only to love, be hurt, feel betrayal and anger - but to stick by their hopes stubbornly (sometimes too stubbornly). The stories are tough and realistic and will tell you things about your life and the lives around you that you may not want to consider, but they are also hopeful and they remind us of the better things in our hearts, too. This is a lovely collection - buy it!
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