Customer Reviews

Last Call: Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

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Last Call is novel in eleven stories. It is divided into four sections and has five narrators, telling about four, non-sequential decades. Stories in the first section are told by one close third person narrator. Three characters narrate the second section, two in first person, one in third. Section three has one first-person narrator. The last section, four, is one story narrated by the original character, though she now speaks in first person. By any stretch of the imagination, this should be immensely confusing, yet to this reader it was not.
Cook grounds the reader from the first page by giving a time period: "March-April 1958", a specific time: "Easter Weekend" and by using the first paragraph to draw the reader into scene with specific description of the family, their home life, and their pets. Though seven proper names are listed in that paragraph, after reading "Laura's father," "Laura's mother," and "Laura and her brothers" we are sure that this is Laura's story. Laura's name is in the opening sentence of the next two stories as well.
I was not at all put out by having to guess, the details of time and place, the uniqueness of the characters, and the suspense about what will happen are all part of the story's charm.
The second story of section two begins with the same date and place as the last story, and it is also in first person, but I knew from the first sentence that this was another voice. "Last call had been made over the intercom, and I began to scrub the stockpile of cocktail and beer glasses on the three-pronged bristles, rinsing them quickly in standing water, a glass in each hand." Gene's sister, Gloria, and her son were working at the Texas Moon, so I felt pretty confident that this was either Gloria or her son. When the narrator noticed the body of a cocktail waitress, I supposed this was Gloria's son, but I knew better than to assume anything. Then I smiled as though the author anticipated my question and was smiling at me while providing the answer: "My mother got me the job."
The last story of this section jumps ahead eight years, and the third person narrative alerted me to a shift in narrators. The second sentence filled in the blanks: "Rich rumbled up to the apartment complex and parked on the chalky gravel." I must admit that by now I had started scribbling a sort of family tree type chart, but only because I knew and cared about this family. The author's attention to detail gave me vivid pictures of characters, and I needed to understand all the connections between them.
The third section of stories is told in first person by the character Lee, son of Laura, but information was not given freely. The opening story speaks of a boy's father, but the story continues over four pages before the first real hint of who the narrator might be is given. A grandmother says "Laura, Neil's plane has crashed," then seven pages later, the character Neil calls out a son' s name (Lee), which finally gives a name to this narrator.
The next three stories are sequential in time and told by Lee. The narrator of the final section is easy to identify: a familiar face in a new tense. "My sister, Gloria, said I
needed to get out, try being a real person again, so she'd dragged me to this party with friends of hers one Sunday afternoon."
Though technically this could have been one of Gloria's brothers, previous knowledge (the brothers don't have to be dragged to parties, none of the brothers have ex-husbands) told me quickly that this was the voice of Laura. The date, 1990, was almost unnecessary. This was the voice of a new Laura: one who no longer watched her life from afar. Her failed relationships, regrets, and personal pain are felt with her every thought. The original Laura kept a distance, one which probably kept her sanity through the long set of unfortunate circumstances that made up her life. Last Call's ending story is a poignant and perfect consummation for Laura's life.

Let me deal with the pointlessness aspect of some of the tales. This occurs because the book tries to be a novel in short stories, but Cook is bereft of understanding how to properly structure such a work. There are twelve putative `stories', broken into four sections. The problem is that many of the stories simply cannot stand alone, and therefore become de facto chapters, or filler between the other tales. Yet, as chapters they don't work either, because Cook does not give the pieces enough grounding with connections to earlier nor later chapters, or `stories'. Recently, I read a book of nine interlocking stories that worked marvelously as stand alone tales and as a novel in short stories, called Ernie's Ark, by Monica Wood [LINK]. There are moments in Cook's book that are every bit as well written as Wood's work, but Cook fundamentally doesn't understand the role structure can play in making or breaking an otherwise interesting tale, as he sometimes errs the way Niemi did, by climaxing his tales too early. Yet, he is not some talentless PC Elitist hack, but his tales all conform to the worst of MFA workshop formulae. Not coincidentally, the book's dust jacket declaims Cook as a creative writing teacher at a small college in Arizona. To use the parlance of that oeuvre; Cook has potential, but he's yet to find his voice. The skills he demonstrates in this book are almost totally subsumed by a slavish conformity to banal structure....because one might think because I've pointed out many flaws and cannot recommend this book overall as a good read, that I think Cook is yet another literary hack and fraud: he's not. Truly bad writers, like a Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody or Dave Eggers, will never have to confront the choice of whether or not to choose real individuated art or lowest common denominator slop to get published. Cook does; although one could argue that since his book was published by a university press, retailed for $25, yet an author signed copy was bought by my wife for a single dollar at a markdown table at a Barnes & Noble less than a year after its debut, and was only stocked locally because of its Texas theme, that this, in itself, should have been the opportunity to really break free, and realize his potential. College presses get lousy distribution, no major reviews, and even blurbs from unknowns, and are, in many ways, little better than vanity or print on demand presses, so why bother getting published there if not to take advantage of the freedom from commercial genericization? I just wonder how much dumbing down and bowdlerizing the press was responsible for since Cook states that many of the tales were seriously revised following their initial publication in journals?

Cook could do well from not being star-struck by big name writers, but looking at a contemporary published masterwork in Monica Wood's Ernie's Ark to see what his tales could have been had he been more genuine in his narrative voice, rather than assuming the generic mantle of `connector of comedy and pathos'. As with Cook's tales, Wood's individual tales are not multi-dimensionally complex, but they synergize into something more rich via their parallax. Cook's do not. Last Call is a promising, but ultimately disappointing book that I hope serves as Exhibit A in an immature writer's coming to grips with the clash of his potential meeting his desire to conform for the masses. It is properly to be termed juvenilia, for these stories lack a personal signature, and too many of the tales exist in an unsatisfactory netherworld between being true stories and serviceable chapters of a larger narrative, and failing fully at both tasks. There are flashes of a real `K.L. Cook', but far much more, and too much of just another MFA wannabe. Too many bad critic- even those who might be able to see his weaknesses, would simply praise this book because they like what he attempts- as I do, yet not point out the manifest flaws. But, that modus operandi is why there are so many published writers who are far less talented and accomplished than even Cook is in this work- where he shows he is a talented non-PC writer simply too straightjacketed in workshop formulae. I demand more, especially from those like Cook who can likely meet that demand. However, his next book will likely be a career definer- it could herald his frittering away of potential, damning him to a career trajectory of countless forgettable contemporary writers, or his ascension to the status of a major writer- one whose works not only excel in form, but explore real characters in bold ways. Those tales and writers are sorely needed in publishing, and Cook has a choice to make.