Customer Reviews

The Secret Goldfish: Stories

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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.

"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.

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.

If you like stories that involve countless murders (everything from simple drownings and O.D.'s to throats slit with boxcutters and the heads of elderly men stomped in by steel toe boots) then this one's for you. How Means can be compared to such realist writers as Cheever, Ford, Wolff, and even Carver is beyond me. These stories are all experimental in form and have nothing to do with any of these writer's work. The main theme is of course vioence, violence, violence. Means seems intent on reminding us that his home state of Michigan is full of pedophiles, rapists, murderers and all around psychopaths. OK, we get it. The few times that Means does get off the "My state is full of psychos" stuff he gets incredibly dull, as seen in "Dustman Appearences to Date" where he gives us ten pages about dust clouds that resemble humans. This one is just tedious. The story "The Nest" was great and there are some wonderful sentences thrown in between all the homicidal behavior but not enough to recommend this book.