STAY AWAKE STORIES by Dan Chaon

This collection of powerful short stories are not what you think when conjuring up stories told around a campfire with the intent to scare someone.  But, these stories have a hypnotic hold on your psyche that manage to get under your skin.  Ghost stories are frightening for their supernatural, ephemral aberations.  These stories do contain, horrific deaths and human sufferings, the harshest of all being loneliness.  Dan Chaon is renowned for his evocative short stories and a Nat'l Book Award finalist for AMONG THE MISSING.  In STAY AWAKE STORIES there is a dark omniscience and feeling of detachment that leaves the reader an eerie feeling of solitude.  There are also stories where the main characters vie to free themselves of all entanglements.  Chaon writes "there are ghosts everywhere."  He is referring to all the lonely people, where do they all come from? He writes of the  pain in wanting to make connections where there are none.  The implausibilty of finding someone who offers understanding and compassion is so palpable I felt as though I stepped into a TWILIGHT ZONE episode in which I fell into Hopper's Nighthawks painting.

WICHITA by Thad Ziolkowski - The homeland for Tornadoes

Wichita is a dark, quirky novel of family dysfunction.  I'm reminded of Tyler's DINNER at the HOMESICK RESTAURANT and Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS.  The distinction with Ziolowski's novel is the strong familial love between the two brothers, Lewis the recent Columbia grad and Seth, the drugged up dropped out problem child and their eccentric mother, Abby.  Lewis returns  home to Wichita after graduating without a job to live with Abby & Seth. Abby is divorced from their father, Virgil, a prof. @ Columbia and whose side of the family are all in the academia world.  Abby & Seth's world consist of a motley cast of shady characters bent on self-destruction.  Lewis is caught somewhere in the middle. He lived in NYC with Virgil to attend Horace Mann H.S. & Columbia college.  The matriach of Virgil's family believes that Seth should be disowned but encourages Lewis to prevail in his studies.  The other side, Abby and Lewis "were like parents together...with a bond formed around handling Seth, their strange child."  Things are doomed to get a lot stranger.  This is a quirky tale of what being a family entails: a lot of work and a lot of love.  "All the effort of keeping up the wall, the wall of family."  What a pity when all the love & effort are not enough to sustain a family.

Nam Le's THE BOAT, anchors us all together

Nam Le is a Viet Namese born, Australian Writer.  His book of short stories, THE BOAT, won the Dylan Thomas Award, the most prestigious literary prize for young writers.  Nam was an infant when his parents fled Viet Nam as boat refugees.  He studied law & served on the Supreme Court of Victoria. Nevertheless,  he made a major career choice to become a writer. Nam enrolled in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  His motivation for change stemmed from his passion for reading & his desire to create the feelings he got from books.  The hero of the 1st story is a writer @ Iowa's Writers Workshop named Nam Le. He is visited by his father, a Viet Namese refugee now living in Australia.  Le tries to capture's his father's own tale of survival and family sacrifice during the invasion of the Viet Cong & American soldiers in what we call My Lai.  Nam painstakingly captures his father's story only to realize his father destoryed his only manuscript. Nam in anger tells him he does not understand what he did was unforgiveable.  He feels both regret and remorse with wisdom too late knowing his father did understand.  The 6 other  stories in this keenly intelligent and captivating collection take you on a journey around the globe; a coming of age male Australian high school student, a young girl living outside Hiroshima prior to the bombings, an American tourist visiting her friend in Tehran who returned to support the revolt,  an elderly American artisit hoping to meet his estranged daughter, a male adolescent caught up in the violence of the drug cartel in Columbia.  Each story is incredulous in its power to enthrall the reader.  As varied as each locale and character are, I felt the mind and heart of each.  There is a unifying theme to these stories.  Nam poetically uses water, rain or bodies of water as an analogy for life and shared human experiences.  In the final story, The Boat, Mai, a young Chinese girl crammed amongst a boatload of human bodies, recall's her father's stories - of storms & waves at sea, mild in comparison to the "dense roaring slabs of water," flailing their tiny vessel.  "Flesh pressed against her on every side, the human warmth, feeling every square inch of skin against her body and through it the shared consciousness of - what? Death? Fear? Surrender? She stayed in that human coccon." Nam captures the emotions we all share & anchors us to humanity and one another.

WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP - put me to sleep

The non-fiction book WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP the EMOTIONAL LIVES of ANIMALS was a major disappointment for me.  Being a huge animal lover and long time vegetarian, I thought I would be in sympatico with the author Jeffrey Masson, but it turns out he is a wacko.  Masson's Phd. is in Sanskrit and Indian Studies hardly makes him an authority in the realm of animal sciences.  In fact, Masson admits in his prologue, while visitng an Indian game reserve reknown for wild elephants, he tried to communicate to an elephant in Sanskrit only to provoke the animal into chasing him down and nearly killing him.  What an idiot! Still, I thought I'd find this work to be enlightening and entertaining.  What I found was a rambling of anecdotes on anthropomorphism:  the assigning of human characteristic to animals.  Masson bemoans the lack of scientific research to establish the existence of emotions in animals and fails to provide anything that would corroborate this phenomenon.  I compare Masson's work to Project Nim where a Columbia psychologist raised a new born chimp in a family enviornment which proved to be a debacle and a painful documentary to watch.  Masson was preaching to the choir to treat animals with compassion but even animal advocates would weep from this missed opportunity.

THE ALL of IT - All a Work of Art and Understanding

This deceptively short, stunner,  THE ALL of IT, by Jeannette Haien, slowly reveals the lives of a couple, Edna & Kevin told to Father Declan, at Kevin's deathbed.  Kevin gravely ill confesses to Declan that he & Edna were never married.  Confess, demands the priest of Kevin and allow me to marry you & Edna immediately.  Kevin tells the priest that he cannot.  Kevin's explanation, "that there's some explanations as get you nowhere." Declan declares "that it's not for me to judge, but for God, and for Him to understand and forgive."  Oh that he should heed his own words and judge not, lest he be judge.  For it is Edna who reveals to the priest that she & Kevin were brother and sister and adamantly refuses to confess to him as a priest but will confide to him as a friend.  The priest's passion outside his parish is fly-fishing and he agrees to hear Edna out against his better judgement , "You've netted me with your telling."  Edna unfurls her tale  slowly like a fisherman casting his line.  It is with patience and understanding Declan condemns his own self-righteousness.  "... he had done naught but review his life in terms of the crime he had committed against her...To work one's imagination on someone else is evil." Patience is a virture and all we crave from one another is companionship. Reel in this elegant, moral story and take it to heart.

EMILY, ALONE - Rings Close to Home

The author for the novel EMILY, ALONE,  Stewart O'Nan, has received the Faulkner Prize for SNOW ANGEL and the Heinz Lit. Prize for his short story collection; IN the WALLED CITY.  O'Nan drew me into his novel about aging gracefully and looking back on one's life.  Admittedly, I thought this book might be geared for the geriatric set but I soon realized that this is a story we can all relate to; either having an elderly parent or with the understanding that this is the path we all will take should we be blessed to reach old age.  Emily, a widow, lives alone except for her loyal companion, her dog Rufus.  Both her son & daughter who have long since moved away from home with children of their own.  Emily tries to fill her lonely days and desperately waits for calls and visits from her family.  Emily also has her spinsiter sister-in-law, Arlene, for better or worse, who look out for each other.  "Though they all lived alone, and preferred to, they were all worried about one another equally."  I grew to care for Emily despite her self-righteousness because so much of what she did or thought was touching and meaningful.  "At her age, it was dangerous to think the past was all she had, her life already defined, when every day was another chance."  I'm going to call my mom and tell her to read this book and how much I think she'll enjoy it.

IN ONE PERSON by John Irving - a plea for tolerance

Having finished Irving's IN ONE PERSON, I'm left with a deep melancholy for the intolerance and insurmountable lives lost to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980's.  Irving is the master of politicizing prescient issues of the day by giving us indelible heroes who find fortitude with the support of colorful and generous characters.  Billy Abbott struggles with his bi-sexuality while attending an all boy's boarding high school.  His support comes from his kindly, thespian step-father, cross-dressing grandfather and sometime lover & life-long friend, Elaine.  Irving's story begins in an east coast, all male boarding school in the 60's. A time when  homosexuals needed to be covert, or suffer humiliation if not outright physical abuse.  Irving references the numerous alum who are killed in the Viet Nam War. The veterans who did return were spurned by our country.  The 80's aids victims outnumbered Viet Nam casualties and were also ostracized.  Billy loses far too many friends and associates to aids. In the 90's Billy returns to his school to mentor other young students and observes some progress in terms of sexual tolerance. But what progress has really been achieved? Gay marriage is illegal in most states.  Bullying of others has become epidemic.  In the words of the late Bernard King,  "can't we all just get along?"