Customer Reviews

You Are Not a Stranger Here: Stories

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This debut volume of short stories by Adam Haslett begins with six of the most haunting stories I have read in a long while. The last three short stores, while very good, do not reach the same level as those first ones but it is a relief to step back a little from the power and the pain. Mental illness, grief and loss form a common thread throughout the book. The title of the volume comes from the words of one of the characters but the words of another could just as easily have substituted, "We will survive this". Somehow the characters do survive, just barely and with their pain a throbbing wound, but they do survive and the author brings us gently and persuasively to this understanding that people can and do survive just about anything. The stories should make you cry a little, feel a little empty for a moment, and then give you your breath back as you contemplate their jagged beauty. A gem of a book.

Adam Haslett's book You Are Not a Stranger Here is a wonderful collection of nine short stories. All the stories are built around characters that are lonely and isolated from the normal world. There is a sadness to all nine stories that link them together despite the distinctly different settings, characters and situations. I give this book four stars only because some of the stories are so good that they make the others look mediocre. While none of the nine stories is actually mediocre, the outstanding ones show that Haslett is capable of doing better. Haslett's style of writing reminds me of William Faulkner. Haslett's mastery of prose will surely establish him as one of the best new American writers.

Adam Haslett's "You Are Not A Stranger Here" is the best collection of short stories I have read in a very long time. These are wonderfully engaging stories, rich with a menagerie of misfit and off-beat (but next-door-neighbour type) characters, each moving through depressive and manic events and circumstances, narrated by an exquisitely-familiar voice. Most of the mini-masterpieces deal with suppressed homosexuality, mental illness taking various shapes and forms, love unrequited, and the curses of extra-sensory perceptions. If only this brilliant wordsmith Haslett had more than one book.

Haslett's collection immediately brings to mind Lydia Davis' Break It Down, how each tale is of the intricate relationship between two people and the often harrowing world in which these delicate bonds are made. Haslett, however, has an inimitable knack for building the most unlikely relationships and, by extension, the most unique stories. An aging, manic inventor tries to reconcile the severed relationship with his son; a high school boy admits to himself that he's "the only kid at his school who gets his romantic advice from a schizophrenic"; a brother and sister, living together, alone, await a visit from a man they both once loved twenty years before. Nothing is as it seems - even a man's hometown, draped with those typical childhood memories, is punctuated with grief:

Emptier still, the train moves on, past the tennis courts and baseball fields where Daniel played as a child, past the supermarket here he bagged groceries after school and the police station where he and his mother used to file the missing person reports.

But Haslett's stories are beautiful even in their harshest moments, as they bear with them an overwhelming emotional intensity. The normal lives of his characters are ultimately shattered by loss or the realization of its inevitability. So often the characters end up exhausted, faces in hands, at the end of a long journey of reconciliation - and in doing so, the stories also show great promise and hope in the human spirit.

It is a rare thing to find fiction that deals with flawed and wounded people without driving into the ditch of sentimentality. It is rarer still to find prose that grabs the reader while we are learning about these people's lives.

Haslett writes simple stories about complex people and offers no easy answers and no trite endings. They are just honest stories about regular people, many of whom are dealing with emotional disturbance or staggering loss. His skill is presenting these biographies without judgement and with an attention to detail that allows you to notice every flick of a cigarette and every lock of hair twisted between nervous fingers. You learn about these people in a way that is often uncomfortable. As I read these stories I was reminded how much we learn of strangers on long train rides or airport layovers. In a few hours and in a confined space many secrets are shared and sometimes a rare intimacy can occur.

Haslett's stories capture rare intimacies and his language is lyrical without distracting from the story. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the human condition and especially to anyone who works with the mentally or physically ill. It is a revelation.

Adam Haslett is a writer who knows how to lure you in. His stories have a melodious rhythm burnished to a high sheen by his obvious intelligence and sophistication. He is a times a writer in search of his own voice (as you'd expect in a debut collection), but the characters and plots of his stories are bold and self-assured. For all his charm and sophistication, he knows how to hit the reader with tragic stories that are too complex to be dismissed as melodrama.

The flaws other reviewers have pointed out are there (if you choose to see them as flaws). Haslett's stories mostly trade on the same handful of themes: thwarted homosexual desire, mental illness, and parental abandonment (usually by suicide). More disappointing (IMO) is the weakness of the last three stories compared to the others. I read an interview with Haslett where he said he wrote the last three after signing a contract for the book. They feel rushed and uninspired, as if they were dashed off to round out the collection. In the same interview, he said he's working on a novel. It's now been a few years since this collection came out, so hopefully his novel will be out soon. I know I'll be first in line to read it.

Started and finished the book in one sitting and wanted more
The complexity, depth of characters crafted and the situational anxiety they are placed in was emotionally draining. I felt my life was improved at the same time becoming more troubled.
Amazing writing.

I always enjoy being able to discover a new author whose talent reminds me of why I got a job at a bookstore in the first place. Adam Haslett's debut collection has done that once again.

Incredibly emotional and heartbreaking, the stories in this collection are still resonating within me. Everything about the settings and characters is just right. They do what they should do, but you don't expect it.

The first story in the book, "Notes to my Biographer", stunned me. I read it again as soon as I finished the story. Then I went on.

If you like this, try Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" or Michael Chabon's "Werewolves in Their Youth."

Highly Recommended!

Adam Haslett's collection of short stories held my attention from the first word until the end; when is his next book coming out? I was well into the book before it dawned on me that each story contains a character with different forms of mental illness. Mr. Haslett really seems to understand different forms of these illnesses. Several stories are told from the point of view of the mentally ill person, and this reader found them likeable, in their own way.At the same time, he also conveys the (sometime) frustration of family and friends who do their best to coexist with them. I finished reading this book with greater appreciation and understanding of humanity in all it's "capacities". (Who doesn't have a few crazies in their family?) One might expect a book of short stories of "eccentrics" to be a bit depressing, but that is not the case. Adam Haslett writes with clarity, humor, sadness, and love. Best wishes to his writing career!

When this volume was first released it generated the kind of buzz usually reserved for acknowledged literary lions like John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. So, was the hype warranted? Yes and no. Each of the stories is well crafted. However, taken together they seem somehow to suffer from their thematic commonalities (much in the same way David Leavitt's "Family Dancing" did). Haslett's themes are loss, isolation, mental illness and loneliness. Of the nine stories collected here my favorites were: "The Beginnings of Grief" about a teen-age orphan who instigates a sexually abusive relationship with a schoolyard bully in an effort to anesthetize his feelings of loss and abandonment; "The Good Doctor" tells, with heart wrenching clarity, of a mother's grief and guilt over the loss of an unreachable drug addicted son; "War's End" finds a clincally depressed, suicidal man making what may be a final connection with a dying boy; "Reunion" focuses on a young man's self-imposed isolation as he is slowy ravaged by AIDS. At his best the author communicates an acute and finely developed sense of suffering and emotional neglect. He does, on occasion, overreach. However, on balnace, "You Are Not a Stranger Here" is both brave and assured, and Haslett has proven himself an exciting new talent.