Customer Reviews

My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The words used by reviewers and readers were stunning, dynamic, monumental, remarkable debut......I found the book to be good, but NOT as great as other short story authors debuts. I was expecting something much better, especially after reviews from when he was here last spring. For a book that was supposed to be very erotic, I found the sex in it very selfish. I also found the men, shallow, gasping for love, gasping for intimacy, but very underdeveloped. Psychologically I wanted to know why each character lost the girl in the end. This is probabally the issue of the author, but I'd rather dive into the characters than the problems the author has with relationships.

The strength of this book is the dialog and poetic prose, which were very very strong----actually delightful. The author should beef up his characters just a bit to give them real individualism, and then this book would be stunning, etc.

My Life in Heavy Metal is a wonderful first book of short stories, so funny in places that it is easy to miss what is serious, disturbing and funny about it. It is a tremendously bawdy book, and its humor--for instance when the narrator of "How to Love a Republican" speculates on why Republican men shun cunnilingus--is wild and bawdy. But the humor in these pieces is more often than not a sad humor, its narrators essentially unforgiving of themselves. More often than not, Almond seems to suggest, sex is the hard place where the ego splinters and fragments and after which the ego rejoins, battered but tragically reinforced.

The stories vary in tone. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is one of two or three stories that essentially borrow their structure from romantic comedies. In deed, one could imagine some smart producer optioning them. The short shorts in this collection--"Moscow" and "The Law of Honey"--are lyrical celebrations of the force of desire and the goodness of desire. These are brief lyrics that celebrate the pursuit and not consummation as part of our noblest aspirations. Almond is attracted to an earthy dream of eastern Europe that we might get from the poems of Simic or Milosz as a sort of pure imaginative territory of smoked meat, pickled fish, and cabbage, a smoke-filled alternative to the disembodied health of snowboarders and their ilk. "The Last Single Days of Don Victor Potapenko" has some of the mouthy chutzpah of Babel's Jewish gangster stories like "How It Was Done In Kiev."

Almond's natural story telling terrain is the culture of young, intensely ambitious and narcissistic educated professionals. Ambition, narcissism: how much of America does that cover? One wonders if Almond, a former journalist, chose to move to Boston to examine the specimens that he needed to tell his stories. There is a certain amount of sociological comedy in his tales of life on the edges of college campuses. His story "The Pass" simultaneously tells the story of people making passes at each other: two gay soldiers at a night club in German, two middle aged business people in an airport, a couple having a possibly romantic dinner in an apartment, and best of all, some sort of software schnook at an apartment party in what sounds like Cambridge. There is some fantasia, some of his Eastern European wit in his well imagined German nightclub. But his bread and butter egotists are sitting down to sup and drank somewhere between Harvard and Tufts.

Some of the stories in the collection are linked narratives, a sort of Rake's Progress, about a character named David, an aspiring writer with a disastrous love life. The first of these is "My Life in Heavy Metal" is set in Texas where David whom we meet as a young journalist carrying on an affair with a lifeguard while living with his ideal girlfriend from college. This is a story about the disastrous effects of infidelity, a story of sexual shame. A third story deals with the same character a few years later, conducting an affair with a Polish woman and then, no longer content with a long distance relationship, attempting to live with her and her mother in a small industrial town in Poland, a living situation that ends in disaster and shame. The third story "Bodies in Extremis" finds this character trying to jumpstart a teaching career and having a casual relationship with a younger woman-- a deeply unappealing and ambitious conformist--that becomes, as the two characters rehearse their own narcissism, disturbing--disturbing for its intensity and failure to result in love. Later on, the young woman seems to punish David with a disturbing gesture--arranging for him to walk into a room where she has just had sex with somebody else-- only David can not be sure what she has intended. Sex in each of these stories becomes increasingly disturbing, more--from a certain point of view, if you are the kind of person who keeps score--accomplished, but less rewarding, more draining and damaging. "Bodies in Extremis" is in some ways suggestive of Frank Bidart's grand poems about erotic life in their sense of trouble and heartache. However, Almond's sense of the erotic life being linked to the ambitions of the ego marks him as his own sort of moralist. It is this dark sensibility that unifies even the happier and romantically plotted stories in Almond's collection.

The publisher should advise the reader to take these stories one at a time. Blow through it, and you'll miss the micro details, the nuances of language, the zoom lens observations that remind you of why you love reading in the first place.
Yes, there's sex here. And if that turns you off, by all means take a pass. But if you love the idea of small moments made large with words utterly original, yet never contrived or self-conscious, check it out. My Life in Heavy Metal is rich with jewels

This is a collection of exceptionally honest stories that never shy away from the truths of lust and love and the fine lines that separate them.

Almond's prose is sharp, elegant, and often incredibly funny, but never glib. "Geek Player Love Slayer" is a great example of this: the narrator's voice is witty, wired, and sexy, but it's still a story about love, no matter how you slice it, with an ending that will totally whack you upside the heart.

If you're squeamish about sex, you might have trouble with some of the stories in this collection -- Almond doesn't beat around the bush...when it comes to his descriptions of the sensual. But it's not gratuitous; these are stories that truly drill down into what drives desire, what we're all searching for, and the sometimes misguided ways we go about getting it.

I highly recommend this book, especially to people who are tired of "careful' short stories that sacrifice passion to subtlety for its own sake.

I don't usually like reading short stories (I borrowed the book from a friend) but the stories in this collection were so entertaining and so easy to get into, I was really surprised and pleased. Some of them made me laugh out loud, and in all of them I found things I could relate to about relationships and sex. I definitely would recommend it to anyone.

Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002)

To start off with the weak point of Steve Almond's story collection: there's really nothing here you haven't seen before. Almond's stories are the kind of slice-of-life nothing-happens stories written by, it seems, every author on the planet who's written a word at any point past 1983. This has a tendency to make them light reading at best, predictable and boring at worst.

The strong point, on the other hand, is Almond's sense of voice. Each of these stories contains a narrator with an exceptionally distinctive voice. This may be masked by the voice of the narrator of the title story (the first in the collection), who's just a regular guy. But after a couple more, you start to realize how different the characters' voices are from one another, from the brash, unlikable office worker who narrates "Geek Player, Love Slayer," to the interior voice of the narrator of "The Pass," whose voice will, in your head, sound exactly like the guy who narrated all those film strips you watched in grammar school science.

If plot is a literary device secondary to characterization for you, there will be a good deal to like for you in this collection. If you like your stuff primarily plot-driven, however, you may be best advised to look elsewhere. ***

Almond is America's answer to Nick Hornby, but My Life in Heavy Metal is not funny, or edgy, or even that interesting. Many of the stories while being readable, often seem like recycled sitcom plots with a guy meets girl set-up. Also, I would not recommend this book to women. Too many of the female characters are one dimensional, and frankly insulting. A nice attempt, but too cliche and stereotypical.

Steve Almond's short-story collection opens with a first-person narrative about a recent college grad, out on his own writing heavy metal show reviews for a local newspaper while he's torn between two girls. I was instantly won over by this man who refused to attend his live-in girlfriend's best friend's wedding because it was on the date of not just any show, but the Guns N' Roses show. Any 80's music fan could understand that decision! Given the title of the book, I assumed this story was autobiographical and more of the same would follow. Imagine my surprise to meet a brash 33-year old female narrator in the second story, at which point I realized this was a story collection, not a series of personal essays.

All of Almond's stories focus on relationships--on cheating, on unrequited love, on Don Juan bar hoppers who have a new girl every night, on loving foreign graduate students and following them back to Poland, on workplace crushes, on come-ons in bars, and so on. Some are three pages long while others are dozens of pages and span a time period of months in a relationship. None are the same, so Almost is to be admired for creating unique narrative voices for such a wide range of characters. Some are so engrossing that the reader is saddened to leave the characters, while others don't really strike the mark.

If you want to explore people's motivations and behaviors in love, lust, settling, pursuing, and the like, pick this up. If you are a heavy metal fan, read the opening essay and move on.

And so is this book. Although I think that the title story is structurally the weakest, Almond's fiction is tight, decisive, full of humor and poignant moments. He's great at saying exactly what he needs to say in the way he wants to say it. The characters are great too.

This book is brilliant! I can't get over the author's genius. I'll quote the "San Francisco Chronicle" blurb from the back of the book because it sums up what I felt about it:

"...By turns laugh-out-loud funny and tremendously sad. Almond's language is rendered in precise strokes, void of bland modernist generalities, with metaphors so original and spot-on that they read like epiphanies."

My favorite of the 12 stories is "Geek Player, Love Slayer." I keep reading it over and over and can't stop laughing. But I have to warn you that Almond doesn't slow down on the sex parts. He tells them without censorship--hot and steamy.