Andrew Sean Greer Explores Loneliness and Introspection
Written: Mar 24 '05 (Updated Mar 25 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Every story is interesting and thought provoking.
Cons: The stories that are less carefully constructed stand out.
The Bottom Line: Andrew Sean Greer's excellent debut short story collection shows great promise for the future.
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| kchowell's Full Review: Andrew Sean Greer - How It Was for Me |
The cover of Andrew Sean Greer’s short story collection, How It Was For Me, is simply an understated blur of cloudy white, with speckles of barely perceptible blue framing a small figure. You have to peer closely to see that the inch tall photograph is actually a young child, bundled excessively in a plump red snow suit. On his tiny boots, there appears to be some snowflakes; given his posture and the blanket of white behind him, the child looks as if he’s emerging apprehensively from a winter snowfall.
This imagery works particularly well for this book, as this is Greer’s first published collection of short stories, and with this work he takes his first steps out of literary obscurity and out into the public realm. Greer’s stories have been published individually in Esquire and elsewhere, but this is the first time that his work has been brought together in a hardcover collection. Unlike the small child with the tentative expression that peeks out from the cover, however, Greer steps out confidently, with a nicely executed collection of thoughtful stories.
It’s difficult to categorize the stories; Greer gives his readers pieces that cover a broad range of people and places. The locales include Seattle’s Chinatown, Lisbon, and South Carolina; the characters run the gamut from the very young to the very old, and from the desperately poor to the extremely wealthy. The only threads that tie them all together are pain and loneliness.
The thing that stands out most prominently in these stories is Greer’s talent for artful and original descriptions. In all of the stories within How It Was For Me, Greer’s words have a visual feel to them, and it’s impossible not to form a vivid and concrete image of the situations that he describes. In one of the better pieces, “Life Is Over There”, the politics and intrigue of suburban life and parental aspirations are played out over a youth soccer game, and the isolated nearby creek where children play while their parents watch their siblings on the field. Greer set the stage in an early paragraph:
All the parents fill the space around the soccer game, the space between the lines and trees, with their puffs of cigarette smoke, their folded corduroy arms, their red-white coolers and blue-pink baby strollers of silent brothers and sisters wrapped in afghans. The afghans are all gaudy, every one, because a prominent theory holds that children of the seventies should be exposed to mathematical patterns. Tangerine-and-lime geometry. The theory will pass, and the afghans will find themselves on the beds of guest rooms, then in attics, then in church donation bags. But for now the afghans are present, quietly imbuing brazen knowledge, and this puts the parents at peace. These parents are intent on their children’s success, on their young boys out on the field this championship game. The boys know this.
Greer also confidently bends time, arranging bits of stories out of sequence, or allowing the reader a brief glimpse into either the distant future or the nearly-forgotten past of the characters. While I sometimes find this stylistic choice manipulative, Greer nearly always manages to make it work quite well. This device works especially well when Greer resists the temptation to follow up on the emotional repercussions of the foreshadowing or flashback, but simply sets the revelation on the page and allows the reader to consider how these events might impact the character.
Although some of the stories are stronger than others, there is something positive to be noted in all of the pieces. In the cases in which I found the plot to be less than satisfying, the descriptions were wonderful and kept the story readable; in the stories that I felt were a bit overwritten, the character development kept the story interesting. The book almost reads as if Greer had several excellent stories written and published, but some of the others were rushed a bit to be included in the collection. However, the stories are generally quite good, and make for interesting reading. The best of the collection are as follows:
“Cannibal Kings”- A privileged young man escorts a working-class boy on series of prep school interviews during a harsh winter snowstorm, and learns something unpleasant about himself in the process.
“How It Was For Me” – A boy looks back on his childhood in an anonymous suburb, and considers those things that were hidden behind the neat rows of houses, and within himself.
“Life Is Over There” – A look inside the hopes and pressures that parents place upon their children.
“The Art Of Eating” – A working-class woman is hired to be the dining companion of an elderly gentleman.
“Come Live With Me And Be My Love” – The best of the collection, this story won Greer the Ploughshares’s Cohen Award for Best Short Story in 1996. While waiting for his wife, a man reminisces about their early relationship as Brown undergraduates, their eventual marriage, and the manner in which their relationship evolved through the years. While not at all manipulative, this story brought me to tears the first time that I read through it, even though I was hot, cranky and distracted, and waiting for a delayed plane in a crowded terminal at McCarran Airport. Greer gets everything right in this story, and even if I hadn’t read any of the other strong stories in this collection, this one alone would have been enough to add Andrew Sean Greer to my list of writers to keep an eye on.
One thing…if you think that you may eventually read this book, I would advise you to be cautious if you are considering looking it up in the archived reviews of the New York Times for a second opinion. Although I did not read any reviews of this book prior to purchasing it (How It Was For Me was an impulse buy that worked out remarkably well), I read the NYT review of this book after I had my first draft of this review completed in an attempt to find out a bit more about Greer. I was very disappointed to discover that the NYT review revealed a crucial plot detail that would have lessened my enjoyment of “Come Live With Me And Be My Love” had I seen the review before reading the story. While not exactly a plot twist, the information in the review disclosed information that I particularly enjoyed figuring out for myself as the story unfolded.
Originally composed Sep 12 '00.
This is a reposting of a review that I’ve had posted on Epinions since September 13, 2000. When I originally posted it, Andrew Sean Greer had just published his first book, and this book showed up on Epinions with the correct title and publication date; however, with the author’s name incomplete, it wasn’t easily searchable. Now that Greer has published two excellent and critically acclaimed novels, his debut work now has a second, correct place, which is right here. After a marathon reading session in which I revisited all three of Greer’s books, and revisited this review, where I noticed that it was very hard to find with the general search. So, after much deliberation, I decided to repost it here, in its correct place, where it can be easily found by anyone who has read The Confessions of Max Tivoli or The Path of Minor Planets and would like to learn a bit more about Greer’s earlier work. If you are one of the 100 people who had read my original review sometime over the past five years, I apologize for presenting it to you a second time. I had planned to make some edits based on my changed perspective given the passage of time, but I found that my original impressions still hold.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kchowell
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Location: Surrounded by books somewhere in Texas
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I have a toddler and an infant. I'm too sleep-deprived to write much of anything.
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