One way to describe it is to say this book is full of the kinds of short stories they'd force you to read in school—they reek of a high school library. Another way is, it's as if the artsy fartsy kid you knew who dabbled in mythology and the supernatural and was fond of speaking in cryptic tones ended up getting pretty good at the technical aspects of writing. Yet another way, I guess, is if Flannery O'Connor actually attempted to do what William Faulkner did (according to O'Connor, she wouldn't even dare to compete with him.) Or maybe James Joyce is a better analogue. Regardless, I wouldn't go so far to say the collection is bad, but I will say that I intensely hate it. Mainly for the "it feels like the stories I was forced to read in school part." One star.
"The Neon Wilderness" by Nelson Algren (1947)
I can't tell if stories about low-lifes, drunks, petty criminals, gamblers, brawlers, down-and-out Polacks, prostitutes, Dagos who refer to themselves as Dagos, liars, strippers, and general good-for-nothing ragamuffins are inherently boring, or whether Algren's writing style makes their lives feel boring (they all seem to speak in the exact same clipped, late night Chicago slang, to the point where it all grows cartoonish; outside of that, sometimes the narrator launches into odd, out-of-place poetic flourishes; and even outside of that, the characters' names all have an odd, Aaron Sorkin-like plasticity to them.) A lot has been made about how Algren focused on the lives of people who tend to get overlooked. At the same time, a criminal who doesn't think about much besides committing crimes, and a gambler who doesn't think about much besides gambling, for instance, really aren't all that interesting, no matter how eventful their lives are on the surface, no matter how much blood gets spilled. Maybe the reason all these lives are overlooked in literature isn't because us privileged straights prefer to avert our eyes away from the shadowed corners of the city. Maybe it's because the lives you find there, at the heart of it, sound really fucking boring. Which, again, might be entirely Algren's fault. One star.
"The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Ronald Wilks (2002)
Well, the first sign things were amiss is that whenever a lower class character would pop up, they'd adopt a cockney British accent. Then I compared one short passage with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations: you get the sense that things are bit too cleaned up, a bit too smoothed out, some of the oddball magic seems to have been sucked out. Basically, and I'm not 100% certain, I think this Wilks translation might be really bad—I've seen "angular Russian enthusiasm" translated through "logical British reserve" before and along the way something gets severely corrupted. I picked this one up because it contains two stories that are difficult to find elsewhere, but it's a shame that due to the branding (Penguin Books) this is probably one of the more popular Chekhov translations out there. And I was wondering how people could mistake him for being a strict, hardcore realist when it's clear to me that Chekhov is very much an impressionist author. Find the Pevear and Volokhonsky versions. They get the nuances right. Chekhov's artistry is all in the nuances. One star.
"The Fun Parts" by Sam Lipsyte (2013)
To be honest, I picked up this book expecting to run into "what NOT to do" as far as humor in literature goes. And I think I wildly succeeded. (Something tells me though, if you were in your 20s and it was the early 2010s, you would absolutely love this book. Unfortunately, it is not the 2010s, and virtually everything you like while you're in your 20s ages into humiliating garbage.) One star.
"The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook" Edited by Martha Bayne (2019)
I get the sense most good writers in Chicago end up moving away. One star.
"The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1955)
I think I hate Eudora Welty. I suppose I should clarify: I think I hate Eudora Welty's work. And it's not because I think she's a bad writer. In the past I've spoken about how her stories can seem old-fashioned, and about how a reader can feel they're jumping through a whole host of challenging hoops for nothing. Perhaps maybe I can equate her stories to a game of chess: each character seems to serve a specific function, and each piece moves around the board, stiffly, according to their assigned function, interacting with other pieces/functions in different ways to achieve a certain goal. Now, even though each piece may be meticulously hand carved and striking in appearance, and the board may be handsomely colored and designed, and the collisions of pieces may be somewhat inventive, the last thing you ever want recounted to you is the full picture of the ins and outs of a particular chess game, even a thrilling one. I guess what I'm saying is, the stories—with the shared theme of journeys into the unknown—don't ever feel alive to me. You can say Greek mythology essentially takes on a "chess game" form, but with one key exception: there was one captivating, unpredictable human being in there running amok, upsetting everybody's clockwork function (Odysseus actually makes an appearance here but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he comes across as boring.) Even in the most interesting story, "No Place for You, My Love," about two strangers who decide to venture south of New Orleans on a whim, the evocative and lengthy descriptions of that very unusual, very swampy, bug-clouded world eventually begin to reek of dried paint, and the people begin to feel plasticine. Eudora Welty was such a skilled writer, it's possible that this is exactly what she wanted her work to feel like: not a flowing filmreel of ongoing life, but a past rendered in swirling, melodramatic oils that's been framed and encased in protective glass. That's entirely possible. But if I die and find out that the world of death smells exactly like dried paint, I wouldn't at all be surprised. One star.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" by Dylan Thomas (1940)
Whenever he drops in a poem, it makes his prose look like trash. One star.
"Never Come Morning" by Nelson Algren (1942)
I know this is an early book, but if I were to explain why I think Nelson Algren isn't nearly as good a writer as some seem to think (mostly people who hail from Chicago) it's not because he isn't capable of turning a nicely poetic phrase, it's that he tends to overwrite what probably should be underwritten and underwrite what probably should be overwritten—in other words, I think his writing instincts are wildly off. One star.
"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Is this considered a classic just because it's written oddly and structuralist matrices get quite the workout out of it? Because it did exactly what Ulysses did or exactly what Middlemarch did but in a much less compelling, much more tedious way? I could see how aspects of it (the bisexual attraction, the female viewpoints, the metaphysical connections, the prismatic modernism) sort of stood your hair up back in the day. But now that those things aren't so rare, they don't feel strong enough to carry the book—I suppose you could make the argument that I'm not empathetic enough to get it, but I would counter that empathy isn't something that you can demand from people point blank; empathy is such a difficult emotion for people to attain that, once you're enveloped within a fictional work, it's the responsibility of the author to find a way to help you ascend there. But here, as it stands, you drift in and out of the minds of a large cast of characters and it was done in such a way that, no matter whose mind I went into, I barely cared. I mean, what the fuck. This is a classic? I don't get it. One star.
"Insurrecto" by Gina Apostol (2018)
This book kind of makes you wish the story of the Philippine-American War and its aftermath were written by a white person, or any other ethnicity really. At least that way, using an outsider's point of view, they would know what to edit and how best to curb one's excesses. One star.
"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass (1968)
(1) You know those books that people gush about, especially in educated circles, but when you push them to explain exactly why they liked it so much you can never really squeeze out a clear, considerable answer? Partly because its reputation, particularly in educated circles, seems to have surpassed its actual quality? Something, among certain educated circles, you're supposed to like more than anyone actually does? Something you'll spend a proud year telling everyone about, all your educated friends, and years later struggle to remember? This is one of those books; (2) Maybe the reason revisiting postmodernist works feels so deeply unpleasant is that time has proven their “things are so fragmented truth no longer exists” theory absolutely, 100 percent correct. One star.
"Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" (1993)
I'm only on page 200 of 600 but I'm just gonna go ahead and call it: After you get past the novelty of finding out the original, violent versions of the Disney fairy tales we all know, you start to come across a bunch of German folk stories that seem to have been collected from the town insane lunatic—they have no point, they go nowhere, and they read like a series of wacky, random events all crammed together into one short story. If it wasn't depressing enough that a lot of stories feature innocent people getting chopped into little bits for no reason, and evil people humiliating the good, and oftentimes end with a moral that just basically says, "Welp, the world sure is unfair," soon the stories make you remember the time you were trapped at a party and the marijuana ran out before it got passed to you. I can't believe I have 400 more pages of this. (I suppose I should caveat that even as a child I couldn't stand fantasy—"What? People can't have wars in space. Why are you making me watch this?!") One star.
"Flying Home and Other Stories" by Ralph Ellison (1996)
I guess most of these stories are from before "Invisible Man" and were published posthumously which might explain why most of them read like small character sketches rather than complete stories. Honestly, while reading these I couldn't help but think back to my writer's workshop classes, where even the most talented students would routinely turn in works that felt clunky and incomplete. If "two stars" would indicate flawed but not worthless, and "one star" would indicate pretty much worthless then I guess I really have no choice here. Reading this book was unpleasant. One star.
"El Filibusterismo" by José Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum (1891, 2011)
You know when someone accomplished in non-literary fields, someone very intelligent, says they're going to write a novel? And the descriptions are fine, and the dialogue is fine, and the characters are fine, and the ideas are fine, and the cliffhangers are fine, and maybe there's a liberal heaping of esoterica, in this case many many Latin phrases, and maybe it follows that escalating plot curve thing to a tee, and maybe Chekov's gun ends up going off, and at first glance it all appears to be fairly competently put together? And even the writing itself as a whole seems perfectly fine, everything except for the sense of joy experienced by the reader, which falls jaw-droppingly flat? This book does that. The joy part, it turns out, is screamingly difficult to engineer. One star.
"Collected Stories" by William Faulkner (1950)
I'm only 200 pages into a 900-page book but I feel I have enough: If you're interested in reading stories that were sort of shat out whenever Faulkner was strapped for cash and oftentimes very much read like it, then this door stop is for you. Also, don't be fooled by the 1951 National Book Award for Fiction—he probably won it more for the earlier series of extraordinary novels everyone ignored at the time; in fact, many of these stories feel like a writer working out his ideas more than one who dearly cared for the craft of the short form. One star.
"Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" by Bette Howland (2019)
Off the top of my head I'm not totally sure of her background but I'd imagine these are the kinds of short stories you'd get if a lifelong copy editor decided to try their hand at fiction—meticulously assembled and boring as fuck. "Public Facilities" is pretty good though. One star.
"Birds of America" by Lorrie Moore (1998)
I pulled this off my shelf expecting to be enchanted. Instead, I finished it bored out of my mind. I've read this before and what's striking is none of the stories except one seemed familiar—apparently, I had easily forgotten them. Now, the one story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is still pretty fantastic, but coming after 200 pages of quippy protagonists who are fond of wordplay, and starring yet another quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay, to be followed by yet one final quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay and also accidentally murdered her friend's baby, even this stellar story caused my eyes to glaze over at one point. The cynical thing to say is, stories about white people who work in academia can't possibly be all that interesting. But if I were to try to dig for a deeper reason for its failure, I think it's that the book perfected writer's workshop tenets at the time: it's the epitomy of Carver-like minimalism. It's the "epiphany of the tiny moment, the power of the unsaid" writing writ ideal. In 1998, this book was considered a remarkable gem. By those rules, this book is an unprecedented triumph. Little did anyone at the time realize though, the rules they enforced and celebrated were arbitrary and not universal. One star.