Customer Reviews

That's True of Everybody

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I first read Winegardner with his epic, brilliant novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING, a book I can't recomment highly enough. It was a pleasure, and even a shock, to see him as at home writing short stories as he is writing a big, visionary novel.

I'm not sure if there's any American writer who's been shortlisted as often for Best American and other prize anthologies and been overlooked by the annual judge. But it's important to note that the stories here that have had such attention--"Keegan's Load," "Song for a Certain Girl," "That's True of Everybody" (which appeared in TriQuarterly and is collected here as "The Untenured Lecturer") and "Ace of Hearts" are, as a group, as good a quartet of stellar stories as you're going to see from any writer the past five years.

I very rarely give 5 stars to books, but this one blew me away.

I began reading Winegardner's work after hearing him read his funny and disturbing story "Keegan's Load" in front of a truly wowed crowd of about 1000 people here in Madison, Wisconsin. I bought his story collection that day, and was frankly shocked that all of it was as good as that story. I don't remember taking so much pleasure in discovering a writer since I first read Lorrie Moore. Since then, I have read both his novels -- The Veracruz Blues (excellent) and Crooked River Burning (a masterpiece). Winegardner is about to become pretty famous, once his sequel to THE GODFATHER comes out. He's a much better writer than Mario Puzo, so prepare yourselves. In the meantime, read this book now so that once Winegardner hits it big, you can pride yourself on being ahead of the curve.

This is a hell of a good book: audacious without being showoffy, full of heart without ever stooping to sentimentality. The first story, "Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home," is a particular stunner: that rarest of short stories--the sort that manages to get a 300-page novel into a 20-page story, without the effort ever showing.

Many of these stories have showed up as Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories, and one, "Keegan's Load,"is in the new New Stories from the South (2003). He'll be a regular in those annuals for years, I bet -- unless he does such a good job with the sequel to The Godfather (don't be surprised if it's better than Puzo's) that he sticks to novels from here on. I doubt that, though. No one with this much evident love for short stories is likely to abandon the form.

Mark Winegardner has followed his epic novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING with a fine collection of eleven stories that capture that that is essentially American. Going back to he Midwest of his youth, Winegardner, while seemingly straying from the mainstream with slightly out of normal characters, really does nail down things that are 'true of everybody.'

Winegardner's stories are well-paced, quickly developing his characters in a manner that makes them both reliable as narrators and recognizable in some way. The language flows smoothly with an excellent and varied vocabulary. Though Winegardner is the Director of the Creative Writing Department at Florida State University, nobody would lump any of these stories into the 'cookie-cutter MFA' variety.

Instead, his stories can be lumped together as efforts that burn with an energy, leading the reader to the conclusion, whether it be thrilling or not, at a rapid pace. While at times, it does not seem like an incredible amount is happening, the writing and tone keep the reader involved. That and a pretty sharp sense of humor, a fair amount of which could be considered black.

The collection opens with "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home." The story revolves around Harry, the proprietor of a bowling alley in the Cleveland area of Ohio, his two daughters, and a lane girl who ends up going AWOL the day she is to receive her first check.

Harry goes to visit his eldest daughter Debra for the opening of her new painting exhibit. Over dinner, Debra and her husband, whom Harry is not a fan of, explain that Harry might not be ready for her new muse; she paints nothing but phalluses. Harry ends up buying one of the paintings and having it shipped home in order to support his daughter. When he arrives home, Jane is out very late, and he has to come to the conclusion that the story title poses.

What he has a difficult time doing however, in an apparent way of dealing with his daughters no longer needing him, is letting go of the fact that his lane girl just quit. He goes to the extreme of driving out to the address she listed on her application, and calling the phone number of her former residence in Nevada numerous times trying to verify she was okay. Throughout all of this, Harry is also going on dates via the personal ad section of local papers in an attempt to find somebody for himself.

The story wraps up nicely with Debra having a baby and Harry realizing what a good father his son-in-law is, Jane moving in with the bartender at the bowling alley, the discover of a dead young woman turning out to not be the former lane girl, and Harry deciding that 'Someday, someone would hear what it was Harry Kreevich was really trying to say.'

The middle of the collection contain a trio of stories: The Visiting Poet, The Untenured Lecturer, and Keegan's Load, under the heading Tales of Academic Lunacy: 1991 - 2001. These cover, in great detail and insight, topics that very easily could have gone under easy stereotypes. The Visiting Poet goes after the professor bedding students issue; the Untenured Lecturer takes on the one-hit wonder professor; and Keegan's Load very adeptly handles the aging department head not being understood by a younger generation of professor's. Readers with friends who have received MFA's or are professors have undoubtedly heard comparable tales, but Winegardner makes each of the three stories seem like totally new concepts. He avoids the stereotypes and creates three dimensional characters and issues.

The final story in the collection, "Halftime," allows Winegardner to experiment a little. His main character, taking prescriptive medication seems to be falling apart right in front of the reader. Trying to determine if the events being written are truly occurring or just going on in the protagonist's mind creates an added sense of interest for the reader.

In each of the stories, Winegardner allows a bit of separation from his characters. While he develops them quickly, he never really pulls the reader inside their minds. It is this separation that allows the reader to believe that the actions they are reading could be true of everybody. What Winegardner does so well, is have his characters, no matter what is going on in their lives, positive or negative, keep hope. Here's hoping that he continues to write fiction in its shorter form in the future.

I grew up in the mid-west in the seventies. When I remember the hot, dry summers riding my banana seat bike, the neighbor kid on a skate board behind me holding on to the sissy bar, I can smell the air and I can feel the sweat on my skin from the hot sun. When I think about the muted screams of the neighbor kids yelling from their snow forts to ours - the ones we built out of the three feet of snow that fell the night before - I can feel the stinging cold and my itchy scalp from my sweaty matted hair under my stocking hat. While I didn't get married in high school ("Song for a Certain Girl"), I don't suffer from narcolepsy ("Halftime"), and my parents never owned a business ("Last Lovesong at the Valentine" and "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home"), I know that Winegardner gets it right: the mood, rhythm, and vibe of these stories ring true. I felt the stillness in the summer air when I read, "Ace of Hearts," the sun on my shoulders when I read "Song for Certain Girl," and I could hear the crickets at dusk when I read "Last Lovesong at the Valentine." At the heart of the collection are three stories set in academia. I'm not an academic. But I felt no less moved by Murtaugh's failures, as a parent and as a human, in "The Visiting Poet." These stories took me to a place I'd never been, but a place that I could have been a thousand times. And you don't have to be from the midwest to appreciate that. Highly recommended.

I read this collection of 13 stories hoping the limits of the form would not allow author Mark Winegardner the elbow room to indulge in the narrative sprawl, asides, annotation that bogged down his novel Crooked River Burning. In these stories, though, the conciseness serves to amplify the other flaws in Winegardner's craft-his Midwestern smarminess (just examine the title of the collection), his mistrust of the natural velocity of the narrative, and his overuse of shoehorned detail and tin-eared metaphors to stamp some sort of authority on the fictions.
Many of the stories take place in a small Ohio town called Tullard. Most involve a level of family strife over money or ambition. The women marry down and the men melt down. Children are wise, even when foolish.
The best story in the collection, "Song for a Certain Girl," avoids most of these pitfalls to draw the reader into the story of a high-school freshman compelled to marry a man she hardly knows. But this story, like many others in the book, ends with a coda that vaults into the future to let us in on what became of the characters. It is as if the author does not trust his readers to imagine the consequences of the actions described in the stories. It's fine if an author looks ahead to clarify issues for himself or herself, as long as the coda later gets amputated-especially if it only confirms what has already been established. Female characters narrate two other stories in the book. In one, a girl in junior high school assumes care of a car-selling, ex-prep-sports-star father who is thankfully not nicknamed "Rabbit." The narrator of "Janda's Sister," is slightly older, but the voice is completely wrong for a young woman.
The dead heart of this book is a triad of stories set in academia, tales of scrabbling for tenure and intercolleague strife that have been done better by better writers. In Winegardner's "The Untenured Lecturer," a mild and mildly talented instructor has his one and only success when he writes a story set in academia. Boxes within boxes. These stories may cause a few readers in higher education to snort with recognition, but that is a mighty small payoff-especially when those same readers may be put off by the writer's repeated use of the non-word "snuck."
The next-to-last story, "How We Came to Indiana," audaciously seeks to re- imagine John Cheever's "The Death of Justina." Told from the perspective of the teenage son of the unravelling ad-man protagonist, it tries to copies the emotional repose and lucidity of Cheever's work. It does not succeed. Cheever respected and elevated his characters. Winegardner merely rents his to display his own shiny things. Winegardner populates his stories with characters that are confessional, introspective, and at the most crucial moments likely to perform some sort of gesture. Not a real action, but something that is meant to be an upwelling from within. Rarely does it seem genuine. Often these moments are examples of anthropological curiosity. Oddly enough, several characters wind up eating important pieces of paper.
To quote the narrator of "Janda's Sister," who is describing a cross-country drive, I can say That's True of Everybody is "a very long trip which I cannot with clear conscience recommend."