The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea [Paperback]

Christopher Meeks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 7, 2005

Love, death, humor, and the glue called family are the elements of this sometimes intense, often funny collection of short stories. As novelist David Scott Milton explains, "In this collection, Christopher Meeks examines the small heartbreaks of quiet despair that are so much a part of all our lives. He does it in language that is resonant, poetic, and precise.... If you like Raymond Carver, you'll love Meeks. He may be as good--or better." In one narrative, a man wakes up one morning to find the odor of dead fish won't go away, but no one else can smell it. In another, a couple's visit with friends to watch the Academy Awards has the protagonist envying his friends' lawn and lifestyle. In these and eleven other stories, Christopher Meeks balances tragedy and wit. Most of the pieces have been previously published in such award-winning journals as Rosebud, the Clackamas Literary Review, and the Southern California Anthology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Poignant and wise, sympathetic to the everyday struggles these characters face." --Carmela Ciuraru, The Los Angeles Times.

"So stunning...that I could not help but move on to the next story." --Entertainment Weekly

"The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea is highly recommended, highly entertaining, and highly rewarding reading." --The Midwest Book Review

"If the publishing and reading wrold is fair and just, Christopher Meeks is destined to be widely read and deservedly honored." --Carolyn Howard Johnson, MyShelf.com

"No matter how difficult or heavy the burden depicted, these stories end on a note of resilience... Deeply authentic." -- Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2006

From the Publisher

The best explanation comes from the following review:

A STORY COLLECTION THAT GRABS THE ID Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, columnist and reviewer for MyShelf.com If the publishing and reading world is fair and just, Christopher Meeks is destined to be widely read and deservedly honored. In The Middle-Aged Man & the Sea, Meeks offers us a collection to savor, one that will leave us thinking about our days, perhaps propel us to change them. These stories, especially the deceptively simple title story, harkens to other stories of the sea. It reaches out to grasp us by the id just as this haunting literary theme has done for eons of time from The Old Man and the Sea and Moby Dick back to Noah and innumerable Greek myths. Meeks' entire collection -- stories from his own archives that were once published in journals -- explores how we live or don't live, sigh and don't sigh, kiss and don't kiss. One story, "Green River," looks at marriage and family life juxtaposed against a remote area of Utah where the Jurassic is still evident and, yes, more water--the isolated tributary of the Colorado--runs through it. Then there is "Dear Ma." The last story in the collection. Once read, you will begin to tally the pleasures in life more frequently, make them count. So, discard your classics--for a moment, anyway. Cast aside those novels you love. Have at a collection of stories for a change. The Middle-Aged Man & the Sea will make you glad that you did.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: Lulu.com (December 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1411647610
• ISBN-13: 978-1411647619
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,154,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Meeks was born in Minnesota, earned degrees from the University of Denver and USC, and has lived in Los Angeles since 1977. He's taught English at Santa Monica College, and creative writing at CalArts, UCLA Extension, Art Center College of Design, and USC. His fiction has appeared often in Rosebud magazine as well as other literary journals, and his books have won several Noble (not Nobel) Awards. His short works have been collected into two volumes, "The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea" and "Months and Seasons," the latter which appeared on the long list for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He's had three plays produced, and "Who Lives?: A Drama" is published. His focus is now on longer fiction. His first novel is "The Brightest Moon of the Century," and his second, "Love At Absolute Zero."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'You were just around for a series of coincidences and then you died.', January 11, 2006

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea (Paperback)

Christopher Meeks bounces onto the literary scene as a vibrant new voice filled with talent and imagination. THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN & THE SEA is one of the finer collection of short stories that will rapidly rise to the top to of the heap of a battery of fine writers of this difficult medium.

Meeks writes about all the little bumps and stumbling blocks we all face in our contemporary journey through life. His stories deal with broken marriages, fractured dreams, death, brain damage, isolation, envy, frustrated communication - all topics that hardly sound like fodder for interesting stories, but in Meeks' polished hands these topics become the conversation of life in society today. They contain keen humor, pain as well as tenderness, and insights into topics that most other writers consider taboo.

There isn't a weak story in the thirteen works here, most having been published in literary magazines prior to this book form. 'Green River' is a family outing that reveals the dissolution of companionship in a few terse pages. 'He's Home' is a quick tale of a man, probably cyclothymic or bipolar, bringing flowers home to his wife only to find she has left him: his response to this lonely discovery explains the probable reasons for her departure. Meeks is able to travel back in time to explore personal idiosyncrasies as in 'The Rotary' and in 'Dear Ma'. In the latter he also manages to take us inside the mind of a failing senile woman (?Alzheimer's victim?) and is written with such finesse and grace that we actually find ourselves thinking in the way Dear Ma's deteriorating mind works. It is a jewel of a story. 'The Fundamentals of Nuclear Dating' is a funny tale that holds a bite and says a lot about our 21st century computer driven dating (read data gathering) consequences. 'Engaging Ben' is as keen an observation of current bonding as any story out there. Et cetera for the rest of the tales.

The odd and strangely wonderful and unique aspect of these is not only the fine writing of a terrific wordsmith, it is also the fact that Meeks is asking us or inviting us to look at the darker things in our lives that go bump in the night. Life in Meeks' stories is full of random coincidences that, depending on our state of vulnerability vs our state of awareness, can either uncover hidden pain or turn on a light to illuminate the elected darkness in which we have chosen to live. He peoples his stories with variations of us and our extended family of humanity and turns us inside out, showing us how our microsecond of life on this planet can be a time of significance or inadvertently squandered.

Biting and sassy, eloquent and intelligent, this collection of short stories is excellent reading. Meeks knows his craft: these tiny microcosms of living offer proof that his novels, soon to come, will be works to watch. Very Highly Recommended.
Grady Harp, January 06

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why can't all writers be like Christopher Meeks?, April 4, 2006

By 

Adam Daniel Mezei "Adam Daniel Mezei" (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea (Paperback)

I'll admit that I'd started reading THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA during an evening, becoming so engrossed in its chapters that I'd wanted to finish it off in one sitting. I couldn't -- Fairies and Dreamland were calling -- but that was the sole reason I hadn't.

Middle-aged Man is *that* compelling. Meeks has this uncanny ability to thrust you right into the center of his characters' sundry dilemmas, desires, and demands -- as if you're standing right there next to them, or sitting one bar stool over listening to their wonderful chats about wine, their musings about the wisdom of the next Shuttle launch, or their ebullient waxing about the velveteen smoothness of Breyer's coffee-flavored ice cream.

As an unrepentant reader, I simply crave books like Middle-aged Man. In general, I want my hard-copied prose to move me. I wish it to twist up my emotions up like a high-tensile spring, then tossing it hither-tither; only at the end to liberate it majestically, like the former occupation of Czechoslovakia: glorious, unencumbered, and free.

I'll only give you a smattering of Meeks' prosaic samples to whet your appetite:

"...a man who ran a steakhouse, but looked like he could run the country."
"...Californicated"
"...Plan your work, and work your plan."

Punctuated. Polished. Perfect!

Like I said, this is merely a smattering.

Within a compact 145 pp, Meeks manages to cram in a delectable smorgasbord of witty metaphors, sage middle-aged reflections, and the wisdom of a well-loved and well-lived man who possesses a depth well-beyond the deceptive chimera of a finite number of earth-years.

As I happily breezed through this read, pondering the magnitude of Meeks' mantra, I couldn't help but let a part of my mind drift towards what I staunchly felt was more than a handful of captivating film ideas. Producers? String a few of these stories together, and you've got the makings of the next MAGNOLIA. I digress...

I guess I can speak for most readers who are fatigued with all the spoonfed jujeune runaround which seems to adorn the spic-and-span oaken shelves of our box-store book emporia.

What we desperately need is more gritty, more hard-hitting, more so-viscerally-real-it-smarts copy that Meeks skillfully dishes up in this astounding collection of tales.

I'll certainly be keeping my eyes out for more from this scribe. In other words, count me in. Big time.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We're all slammed with the unexpected.", April 11, 2009

By 

Sam Sattler (Spring, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea (Paperback)

Nine of the thirteen stories in this first Christopher Meeks short story collection were first published in journals and literary magazines around the country, and anyone reading this little book will certainly understand why that happened. Meeks has a particular talent for getting into the heads of his characters and taking their doubts and concerns as seriously as the characters themselves take them. As a result, readers of Chris Meeks stories do the same.

Not all of these stories are about middle-aged people; some of the main characters are in their twenties, some in their thirties, but they have all reached a place where uneasiness about the future dominates their lives.

The stories are about relationships - between marriage partners, between couples choosing to live together rather than marry, between daters, and between family members of different generations. There are men and women unhappy about what their marriages have become, older men being pressured into marriage by younger women who are becoming more and more desperate to get it done, and older people simply trying to die with a little dignity. Some of the stories are funny, some are touching and sad, and one of them has a Hitchcock-like ending. What all the stories have in common, though, is the ease with which the reader slips into and out of them, along the way learning something about himself and his own state of mind.

My personal favorite, "Nike Had Nothing to Do with It," is an ironic tale about a man who heads out on a run to relieve his anger after the mother of his newborn daughter announces that their relationship is no longer working. What happens next is not what either of them expected when the day began.

Particularly touching are the stories about dying, "Dear Ma," in which an old woman hides more and more in her past as her days run out, and "The Rotary," in which a loyal and loving grandson receives an unexpected gift at his grandfather's deathbed. Meeks, however, manages to make serious points even when he uses humor in his stories. "Divining" is about a man who has become so "Californicated" that, even in all of his weirdness, he believes that he is the normal one and the rest of the world is out of step. And, in "Shooting Funerals," another of my favorites, a 38-year-old woman tries to reinvent herself by becoming the world's first "funeral photographer" - and is honestly surprised by the reaction she gets on her first job.

"The Middle-Aged Man & the Sea" is a very fine short story collection and I highly recommend it, especially to those readers who might be dipping seriously into the short story genre for the first time.

This modern day collection is an excellent place to start.