Secret Goldfish [Hardcover]

David Means (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2005

An extraordinary second collection of short stories from an author who is set to become one of America's leading literary voices. In the tradition of Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff, these are all-encompassing stories of the American psyche; of love and loss; of the landscape and its people. A goldfish circles in its bowl, refusing to die, becoming the silent focus of a difficult family life; a pianist loses his talents as he is forced to question the meaning of love and commitment. Through a blend of lyricism and humour, these stories of ordinary human dilemmas take flight and become mythical and universal. David Means is a rare writer who transports us to the heart of what it is to be human.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The characters in this imaginative and penetrating story collection—a man hounded by lightning strikes, a driver blown off the Mackinac bridge, a pianist whose fingers stop working, a woman who slaughters her boyfriend after ambiguous consultations with Jesus and the devil, a bog man roused from his shallow grave—are beset by bolts from the blue. Sometimes the victims and sometimes the perpetrators of calamity, they struggle to extract meaning—and the occasional glimpses of grace and beauty—from the chaos and brutality that disrupt their lives. Means, author of the acclaimed story collection Assorted Fire Events, probes a broad range of social registers, from junkies and criminals festering in the postindustrial decay of northern Michigan's iron range to the chilly adulteries of the artsy New York haute bourgeoisie, linking them into a bleak, sometimes apocalyptic panorama of the precariousness of life in a country that "could eat anything, absolutely anything, up." His uncompromising vision rarely indulges anything more comforting than harsh poetic epiphanies, inexplicable moments of clarity gleaned from random encounters with destruction; the story "Michigan Death Trip," a litany of demise from nonnatural causes, is emblematic of the book's sensibility. But every so often, as with the titular goldfish who endures, and even prevails, when his tank is neglected by a family in the throes of divorce, a happy ending slips through.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Means' new collection of stories reveals a mature vision in its explorations of violence, boredom, and death in a restrained, cautionary tone. In "Lightning Man," the protagonist suffers a series of lightning strikes that disrupt his life and eventually send him drifting to another part of the rural Midwest, among glue-sniffing, disillusioned farm boys, to tell of his eight fantastic recurrences, vaguely prophetic. In "A Visit from Jesus," salvation and revelation are tragic and ironic, exposing a man's dark secret, leading his girlfriend to kill him and eventually leading to her own murder. "Michigan Death Trip" also has multiple fatalities--ski accident, car accident, drug overdose, murder--that result mostly from a desire for excitement or escape. The title story moves us into domestic suburbia as a fish's owner, whose family life is disintegrating, wonders if the fish is "aware of his eternal hell, caught in the tank's glass grip." Escaping that glass grip, these stories suggest, though much wished for, does not hold much promise. James O'Laughlin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (February 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007164874
• ISBN-13: 978-0007164875
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,399,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific Collection!, October 25, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secret Goldfish: Stories (Hardcover)

This inventive collection of stories revolves around the off-kilter - either something happens that cannot be explained or the characters are bewildered about how they came to be where they are. In the title story, a goldfish survives for nine years despite the odds in a murky, nearly airless tank while a marriage disintegrates. "Blown From the Bridge" tells of the last moments a young man shares with his lover before she and her car are blown off the Mackinac bridge, her fate sealed by a mysterious dedication to her father. The main character of "Lightning Man" cannot escape a lifetime of lightning strikes, but he continues anyway through his ruined and neurologically-fried life. "It Counts as Seeing" recounts the same incident of a blind man falling down the steps of a bank from multiple points-of-view so that this straightforward incident ends up being anything but.

The lyricism in Means's style elevates these seemingly simple stories to a more complex level, as the oddity of life is grounded in the beautiful language of the specific. In most of these stories, Means plays with form. The above mentioned story about the blind man challenges the use of first-person as reliable narrator. "Michigan Death Trip" eschews traditional narrative development by linking its vignettes not through character or plot, but through the end results. In some cases, the author fails, as in "The Nest" when a poignant story is interrupted by a break in form, but mostly he succeeds brilliantly.

These vibrant stories have the unexpected emotional impact of life itself. I highly recommend this collection to avid readers of short fiction.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stellar Collection, October 14, 2005

By 

Willie C. (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Goldfish : Stories (Hardcover)

"The Secret Goldfish" is certainly a great collection of short stories. The themes in the stories seem to be universal in the way they focus in on human emotion (sometimes heartbreakingly so). Means seems to always have a bead on the pulse of his readers. He exhibits a unique ability to know when to go for the jugular and when to pull back.

I would highly recommend this collection.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An act of Hubris! Means co-ops Salinger, November 7, 2005

By 

Iggy Pop (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Goldfish : Stories (Hardcover)

It's a pretty big act of hubris to name your book after something from
Catcher in the Rye (Holden's brother wrote a book by the same name),
and at first I avoided the book because of the title. But don't judge
this one by the cover, or the title. When a rave review of The Secret
Goldfish appeared last fall by Richard Eder--the only New York Times
reviewer I trust--I went out and bought the hardcover. Eder was
right. Means stands out as one of the best writers of his generation.
Hard and dark and intense, and brilliantly different, each story, they
hold together somehow. Means doesn't shy away from the dire lives of
his characters. He writes equally well about the underclass kid life
in Michigan, and the upper class yuppie life out East. He sees the hard
lines. This, and his last book, are two of the best story collections
I've read. It's like discovering something, to find his work. Many
take place here in Michigan, but they range the country. some of
folktales. Some of realistic. The Secret is out. (Means was
mentioned in the recent Harper's essay and in a long review by James
Wood in The London Review.) As a grad student at Michigan I used to
hunker down and feel that great sense of wonder at a great book.
Reading Means, I felt it again.