Steven Schwartz (2)

First and foremost, I could not put this down. I came to care about David Nachman. Even worse, I really worried about him. I think I read this book in one week's time. Told from the retrospective first person, David Nachman, at nine years old in 1960s Pennsylvania, wanted to become a doctor like his father. Stoic and gentle, Dr Nachman did not discriminate patient care at a time when crosses were burning on some front lawns and the whites were moving out to the suburbs. You get the point - he was a good doctor and a good man. David wanted to be just like him. However life had other plans for young David by the time he reached his teens. Desperate to fit in, David joined a group of fellow teenagers for nights of gambling and crude sex jokes. Inwardly shy, it really wasn't his thing but he wanted to belong somewhere so he played along. One terrible mistake changed his course of history forever. At a time full of protest and war, David has his own inner conflict to contend with. Now in his forties, David recounts his coming of age years in a slow and careful cadence. While his remembrances are gentle, it is impossible to ignore the growing undercurrent of guilt.… (mehr)

I have been following Steven Schwartz since his great 1994 novel, Therapy, which still ranks among my top 5, all-time favorite novels. That was published after 2 fantastic story collections, and then another novel came out a few years later. But over the past decade-plus, his writing has only been in appearing in literary magazines, and while I have been able to catch a few along the way, I was excited to learn he had another collection.

He really is a masterful writer. Many better known writers are famous for their talent with a particular facet of writing, such as dialogue or description. But it's rare to find a writer who excels at every aspect of writing. While I get totally immersed in his stories, there are times when you just have to stop amd marvel at how good he is at everything - description, dialogue, metaphors, character development and plotting. His premises are also always bold and fascinating. Just two examples -- a man reunites with the cousin he had a crush on as a teenager after she's had a sex-change operation ("Seeing Miles"); a teacher pulls out a gun in front of his class and points it at his head ("Indie").

To play the simple game of finding one word that characterizes Schwartz's writing, it's dignity - all the characters in these pieces have it, even when they are behaving badly. Schwartz is an author who makes you respect and have total compassion for his characters, even as he's revealing all of their warts.

The 11 stories in the collection are:

1. Bless Everybody - 21 pp -- A powerful and dramatic story about a retiree living on a large piece of property on the Colorado/Wyoming border. He's leading a quiet life, still pining for his ex-wife, when he lets a hippie-ish young couple expecting a baby stay in a cabin on his land. Trouble ensues after the young man kills a deer out of season, presumably to feed his family.

2. Stranger - 17 pp - A wife and mother is waiting in the Philadelphia airport for a flight home to Denver, after her father died. A man steals her wallet when she is napping, and then she meets a kind man in a bar and has to decide whether to take advantage of the in-between state her life has fallen into.

3. Absolute Zero - 21p - A moving story about a 17-year-old who wants to join the Marines but needs the permission of his mother, who is vehemently opposed to wars. He befriends the sergeant who is trying to recruit him, but a failed encounter with the sergeant's disturbed daughter has major consequences.

4. Seeing Miles - 14 pp - A great, great story about a man who reunites with his cousin, whom he hasn't seen in 25 years since his Bar Mitzvah 25 years earlier. That occasion was the first time he'd met her, and he'd developed an instant crush. When they reunite, his cousin has had a sex change. Interacting with the man who was once the girl he lusted after sets off a whirl of confusing emotions. Told with remarkable poignancy and dignity.

5. Galisteo Street - 22 pp - A story that blew me away when I first read it in Prairie Schooner, and it had the same effect when I read it for the second time in this collection. It's about a man who tries to reconnect with the daughter he and his girlfriend at the time gave up for adoption. He was young then and didn't want to be encumbered with a child, so he could pursue his ambitions of becoming a writer. Now, 30 years later, after a few unsuccessful books, his writing has dried up. Even though he got married and had children of his own, who are now happy and successful, he can't let go of the desire to reconnect with his first child, who lived a perfectly content life without him. It's a heart-wrenching story that also offers some eye-opening details of the ego-smashing hardships writers who aren't on the bestseller lists contend with.

6. Indie - 17 pp - A tour de force that examines a tragedy but still manages to find a few lighthearted, comic moments along the way. A history teacher who is a Civil War re-enactor pulls out a Civil War-era pistol and points it at his head in front of his class. Told from the multiple perspectives of the teacher and the students, who sit in shocked terror and confusion over what he's going to do. It's a brilliant look at all the profound and prosaic thoughts that play across the minds of the people in that room.

7. Natural Causes - 22 pp - A retired geology professor's wife dies in a car accident just when she was about to leave him. He starts another relationship with another professor several decades younger than he. She is the opposite of his wife in every way - tall and boisterous while his wife was petite and demur. His conflict is that he can't see himself with her, even though he is starting to fall in love with her. The younger woman, Penny, is a marvelous character. Her goofiness and over-eagerness make you understand why this reserved man mind find her at-times off-putting, but she has so much zealous energy, you can't help but root for her.

8. The Last Communist - 22 pages - An almost mini-novel-like story about a young man who is the son of Russian Jews who works during the summer of 1970 in a Jewish resort. But this is far from "Dirty Dancing," all the Jews at this resort are communists, who still don't want to believe Stalin was all bad, and they engage as often as they can in peaceful demonstrations against the dangers of capitalism. The young man befriends another boy who has a low-draft number and a dark secret - he took part in the part in the burning of a ROTC building on his college campus. There's a lot going on this story - including the main characters' crush on his friend's younger sister - and it's all brilliantly told.

9. Opposite Ends of the World - 18 pp - A man with multiple sclerosis has to resign from his job as a music teacher and deal with the predicaments of his new life - his unpredictable pains, a wife not willing to give up on her hopes of having children even with the demands the MS imposes on their lives, and finally a neighbor who keeps anonymously complaining about their barking dogs. It's a powerful piece about a man having to cope with his own gradual and inevitable decline.

10. Blockage - 20 pp - A failed writer, who is now a dental supplies salesman, takes his wife, who is recovering from sinus surgery to a resort in Arizona. The goal is to celebrate their anniversary, but the resort happens to be near the home of the writer's ex-girlfriend who became a literary sensation with her first novel. The experience becomes a trial for the man, as he's stuck between jealousy over his pretentious ex-girlfriend's extravagant success and his sense of obligation to his wife, with whom he's leading a happily ordinary life. His wife, a writer as well, has her own secret as she's also navigating the space between an ordinary life and aspirations for something bigger.

11. The Theory of Everything - 22 pp - The final story in this marvelous collection packs a wallop. It's about an 82-year-old man, who, along with his wife, has to take care of his depressed son's children, after the son's junkie wife walks out on them. The grandparents make a normal life for the kids, but then after four years away, the wife returns with the promise that she is clean and sober. The grandfather has to face the possibility of losing the children to a son he knows isn't stable and a woman he's still justifiably suspicious of.… (mehr)