Every once in a while–say every five or ten years–I read a short story that blows me away. I still remember mulling over O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (the MOST agonizing story ever written) as a fairly young kid, and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” when I was a bit older, moving on and up through O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle” (which is arguably more novella than short story).

But nothing in recent years has blown me away like the two stories I just read, both by Nathan Englander.

”Free Fruit for Young Widows” was my first exposure to him.  I’d never even heard of Englander before, but I stumbled across this short story in The New Yorker. (You can still read it online on their website.)  I thought it was incredible, so I checked Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges out of the library.

The whole collection is worth reading but the first story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is simply one of the best things I’ve ever read in my life. Period. It’s compassionate, harrowing, funny, poignant, horrifying . . . all in a few pages. And should be taught in every high school in this country. (An aside: there’s a character in it who has autism–at least I think he does; it’s not stated–and it was the most original, compassionate portrayal of autism I’ve seen since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.)

I’ve recommended these two Englander short stories to a bunch of people, ranging from Kim (who reads everything) to my father (who’s in his eighties) to my brother (who mostly reads scientific articles) and everyone has said it’s simply one of the best things he or she has ever read.

I don’t gush about a lot of modern writers, as anyone who reads these pages knows.  I was an English major in college, reading Dickens, Austen, Bronte and the like.  Most modern literature leaves me cold.  I don’t find the stories exciting or the people engaging.  It feels like the majority of short stories I read fall into the same pattern: a description of someone leading your basic life of quiet desperation, somewhat alienated from the people around him, with lots dialogue and details that sum up the meaninglessness of our daily pursuits, and a minor emotional epiphany at the end that leads to precisely nowhere.

But Englander tells a real story and he tells it like no one else.  His stories aren’t “familiar” but they are page-turners.  Frankly, I don’t need to recognize the boring, soul-sucking details of my own daily life in the stories I read: I’d much rather recognize something huge and painful about the way people torture and also love one another, about how compassion is the only healing force in the face of cruelty, about how parents can and should teach their children that, and about how we shouldn’t judge anyone until we know what his life has been.

Englander’s stories remind me of a beautiful and poignant quote from Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle:

“Heritage.  How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savages–this to teach.  To look back and learn what humanizes–this to teach.  To smash all ghettos that divide us–not to go back, not to go back–this to teach.”

This is what Englander teaches.  Only he does it in the best way possible: by writing a story you can’t put down.

What struck me is the pervading sadness throughout the story.  The main character, Charlie, grew rich during the Roaring Twenties, led the high life, then lost his money and his family.  His wife died, a victim of heedless living.  His daughter is living with his sister-in-law in Paris because he was an unfit father.  He is working in Prague successfully restoring his finances.  The story opens with Charlie visiting the infamous bar at the Ritz, but it is monument to the past as Charlie and the bartender list the tragedies that befall the former regulars.  But not only Paris has changed due to the financial collapse, Charlie returns sober and with limited funds. 

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab. 

But it hadn’t been for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember–his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

Charlie is in Paris to gain custody of Honoria, his daughter, from his sister-in-law, Marion, who can barely stand to be in the same room with him.  She resents how he and her sister lived (Fitzgerald gives snippets through out the story) , and how her sister died.  Fitzgerald creates emotional tension that builds as the reader wonders if Charlie will restrict his drinking and will Honoria return to Prague with her father.  At moments, it’s hopeful that the family will be reunited, but the tone of regret and sorrow never eases, signaling a different ending. 

Names are significant in the story: “Babylon” is a place of exile and anguish for the ancient Israelis, and while at one time Paris was an adult amusement park for Charlie, it is no longer.  Marion is married to Lincoln, names reminiscent of American hard-working ideals, and they have worked for middling salaries while Charlie lived excessively off profits he did nothing to gain.  In fact, Marion reminded me a bit of Mary Lincoln, another woman who was resentful, emotionally unstable, and mentally ill.  It goes without saying that Honoria is aptly named.

“Babylon Revisited” mirrors Fitzgerald’s life at the time.  In 1931, when it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, his wild days in Paris with his wife, Zelda, were over.  She was committed to a sanatorium due to her mental illness and their daughter was living with a nanny in Paris.  Fitzgerald shuttled back and forth between the two of them, and wrote to earn a living.  Hemingway observed in A Moveable Feast during the midst of the 20s that after The Great Gatsby “Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that [Zelda] was insane.”  He may  have been right, because in the midst of such hardship, Fitzgerald wrote this beautiful story that shows a heady life and its terrible, tragic cost.

Phoenix walks through deep, still woods, climbs up a hill “through pines” and “down through oaks,” maneuvers through thorn bushes, crosses a creek on a log, crawls under barbed wire and walks through a dead forest, dead corn fields, and a swamp.  She travels through cold and wind.  Just as she starts on “the easy going,” a black dog startles her and she lands in a ditch, too weak to get up by herself.  A young, white hunter helps her out and orders her to return home.  When she insists on going to town, he insults her by saying “I know you old colored people!  Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus.”  But, the motivation for Phoenix’s journey is not trivial, it’s a labor of love.

The title and the nurse’s comments inform the reader that Phoenix endures this journey on a regular basis to obtain “the soothing medicine.”  When the nurse asks if the boy is still alive, Phoenix’s response radiates with love:

“My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, waiting by himself,”  Phoenix went on.  “We is the only two left in the world.  He suffer and it don’t seem to put him back at all.  He got a sweet look.  He going to last.  He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird. . . I could tell him from all the others in creation.”

Ms. Welty said the source of the story was a glimpse of an old solitary black woman walking through a winter landscape.  She wondered what would cause the women to walk there and decided it could only be an errand for someone else, an errand for a loved one.

Easter imagery of death and re-birth is everywhere:  the main character’s name, the journey occurs in December as one year is dying and another will start, Phoenix’s coma-like rigidity in the doctor’s office and then sudden re-awakening.  Other instances of Easter symbolism occur in Phoenix’s struggle to mount the hill, it  ”seems like there is chains about my feet . . . something always take a hold of me on this hill–pleads I should stay” as if it were Golgotha.  Phoenix getting caught in the thorny bush is a reference to the crown of thorns and the scarecrow points to Christ on the cross.  The stops along the way are reminiscent of the stations of the cross.  Having walked the stations of the cross, I can tell you that the meaning of that journey is far better portrayed in this story than fighting your way through the throngs in Old Jerusalem.

In “A Worn Path,” Ms. Welty gives us a story of a journey, one that is undertaken in hardship as a sacrifice for love, just like Easter.

I’ll be keeping track of my challenges through the Kim’s Nightstand page, please follow along.  Let me know if you’re joining any challenges and maybe I won’t feel quite so obsessive compulsive.

And check out our own Independent Bookstore Reader’s Challenge, we’d love to have you join!

Thank you Robin for the image!

I recently found scores of reader’s challenges on the Internet, I’d never heard of them.  There is a reader’s challenge for everything:  short stories, WWII books, world citizen (history and politics), art history, graphic novels (Claire should join this one), RYOB (read your own books), essays, chick lit (everyone participating in this challenge should read Claire’s three fiction books), Notable books, chunkie books (books longer than 450 pages), young adult books, and many more.  Then it occurred to me, Claire and I could do the same thing.  I’m really excited about hosting our own challenge right here on Bookstore People.  So we’re announcing the Independent Bookstore Reader’s Challenge.  Claire’s a bit terrified about the prospect, but I’m confident she’ll love it. 

Challenge Guidelines

Here are the rules: go to independent bookstores that are new to you between January 1 and December 31, 2009 and have some sort of interaction.  The challenge comes with different levels you can sign up for:

• Scout – Visit 2 independent bookstores (easy!)
• Specialist – Visit 2 subject matter specialty bookstores (i.e., travel, children, cooking)
• Nationalist – Visit 2 independent bookstores and 1 additional bookstore in a state you do not live in
• Continental – Visit 2 independent bookstores and 1 additional bookstore in another N. American country (that would be the USA, Canada or Mexico)
• Globetrotter – Visit 2 independent bookstores and 1 additional bookstore on a different continent (if you’re going to Europe, check out Bookstore Guide)
• Type A Personality to the Max – Satisfy any two categories

We’ll have a page dedicated to the challenge where you can sign up and leave comments.  Plus, we’d love to have a review of the stores you’ve found and liked (we ignore stores with bad service or stock), we’ll post it with a description of you and a link back to your blog (if you have one), just e-mail it to me at kim@bookstorepeople.com.  In fact, we encourage cross posting bookstore reviews so post on your blog, Indiebound, Yelp, City Search, City Guide and any other place that would like it. 

We’ll Give out a Prize!

But wait, there’s even more, at the end of the year we’ll have a random drawing among everyone who satisfied their challenge for a gift certificate from BookSense.  What more could you want?  Sign up now and start exploring the wonderful world of independent bookstores.