Happy Publication Day! (May 17, 2022)


My rating: 3.5⭐️

“You Have a Friend in 10A” by Maggie Shipstead is a collection of ten very well-written, thought-provoking short stories.

In The Cowboy Tango, the story revolves around the complicated love triangle between the owner of a dude ranch in Montana, his female employee and his nephew. In Acknowledgements, a writer, on the cusp of the publication of his first book, sits and reflects over his experiences with writing beginning from his childhood school assignment to the unpleasant experiences he had while as a student in a writers’ program. Souterrain takes us to Paris where a man’s questions over his paternity lead to an unfortunate outcome. In Angel Lust, a successful studio executive unpacks more than he could have imagined while sorting through his late father’s belongings. In La Moretta, we meet a newly married couple on their honeymoon in Europe, a trip that does not go as planned. In the Olympic Village, two athletes indulge in a one–night stand. In the title story, You Have a Friend in 10A, a former actress on a flight reflects on her experiences with a cult-like Church and her broken marriage to a high-profile celebrity who was a member of the same. We meet a group of people on an artists’ retreat in Ireland in Lambs who witness a flock of sheep being transported for slaughter, which inspires the reflections on life and mortality.The Great Central Pacific Guano Company takes us to an island where a group of workers is stationed with their families working for a guano company while fighting the isolation, disease and discord that prevails. Backcountry focusses on a woman now married to a philandering husband reflecting on her past relationship with a married man.

I have admired Maggie Shipstead’s writing ever since I read Great Circle which was a favorite of mine last year. The ten short stories in "You Have a Friend in 10A” are wide in scope and varied in subject matter. The stories are introspective and immersive and the characters are complex and flawed, and thus very real, even if a few of them are not particularly likable. Overall, this was an interesting read and as with most short story collections, this is a mixed bag and though you may not like all the stories a few will stand out for you. My personal favorites were “The Cowboy Tango”, “Souterrain”, "La Moretta” and “You Have a Friend in 10A”.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for a digital review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

A great read. I especially liked Lambs, La Moretta and The Great Central Pacific Guano Company. Any of these would make good novels.

The 1974 honeymooners in Romania -La Moretta, is the darkest and possibly the best of the collection. But I loved Lambs, set in a writers’ retreat in Ireland. The water-colorist with his charcoal drawing of sheep reminded me of the obnoxious writer in Mager’s The Colony. Ironically he ends up burning his drawings in the peat fire in his outage.

The most complex plot in the Great Central Pacific Guano Company feels like a first draft of a novel.

Well worth the read ( )

thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories, each was truly unique ( )

This is Maggie Shipstead, so you know a number of things going in. You know that the prose will be fantastic. You know that a sly sense of humor will show itself even in the most emotional, serious, gory tales. You know that it will have a beautiful and unselfconscious feminist foundation. You know that Shipstead understands the worst and the best things about people, and that characters’ actions and reactions will seem improbable until you realize that your assumptions and defenses are getting in the way, and in fact it all rings true. All these things are present even in the stories I did not like and that is the greatest strength of the collection. The greatest weakness in the collection is a fault found primarily in those stories that did not work. For short stories to shine there needs to be something that contains them and makes the story a freestanding unit. Stories can end without resolution. Most of my favorite short stories have no resolution. That said, in my experience good short stories cannot reach in a variety of barely connected directions spinning out into plotlines that are not only unresolved but so undeveloped you can’t care enough to wonder what might have happened off the page. There are short story writers I love completely but whose attempts at novel writing have, for me, been unsuccessful (Lorrie Moore comes to mind) and I think maybe Maggie Shipstead is the opposite – perhaps she ought to stick to novels because her novels are really great and the short stories are not bad, but are a very mixed bag. The story-by-story rundown:

The Cowboy Tango is a confection that I now see appeared in Best American Short Stories 2010 and which I assume will be widely anthologized for years to come. The mysteries of whom we love and whom we should love set over 15 years at a dude ranch, and the rugged individualist at the center of this western is a woman. 5-stars

Acknowledgments about a bitter pretentious author living in Brooklyn and originally from "the middle finger of Michigan" (where I happened to be as I read this) is cunning, uproariously funny, and dead on. The author is (finally) about to publish his first novel and has a lot to say about many things that occurred as he was getting to this moment, Hilarious and an all-out pleasure to read. 5-stars

Souterrain was a precipitous drop after the heights of the first two stories, I guess that pace was not sustainable. Lovely writing, intriguing story possibilities, but for me it read like a jumbled list of well-crafted summaries of major and secondary plotlines from a novel. It left me wondering both why things were included why things were not included. Perhaps I missed something. For me a 2-star.

Angel Lust was amusing. Great language. A fun look at Beverley Hills industry people, people who have walled off their past in favor of creating some sort of spontaneously generated full formed artiste. This, of course, leaves their children without foundation. Some great insights. Example, the central character is surprised when his ex-wife refers to their "family" and he realizes the had only thought of himself having wives and children, never a family other than the family in which he grew up. A very good read, but not nearly as good as it could have been. 3.5 stars

La Moretta is absolutely solid. This story of an early-1970s square peg who marries a wild child and the things that happened on their honeymoon (warning, these are not good things for the most part) also told a story of a very specific time and a place. The characters were all beautifully developed and unique and fascinating. 4-stars

In the Olympic Village was ephemeral at best. There was no there there. The stories in this collection I did not love read to me like great novel treatments. They were too uncontained to be short stories, In the Olympic Village though, I did not think worked as a story or a novel. I like the look at physicality, sex, speed, control, physical beauty - and the "what next" when your physical peak has passed. But that is not enough. 2-stars"

You Have a Friend in 10A tells the story of a former child star, with an irresponsible father (think Tatum or Drew.) Used and abused, now grown she recently fled Scientology like cult, went to rehab, and lost her child to her ex (Tom Cruise equivalent.) This felt to me like the backstory for Hadley, one of the main characters in Shipstead’s last novel, Great Circle. This was a great story until the baffling introduction of a plotline about a soldier's remains on the plane with our protagonist. Still a 3.5 star and maybe a 3.75, yeah, hell we will call it a 4-star.

Lambs is simply fully forgettable. There were a lot of the same themes and devices as in Acknowledgements, though the format was entirely different. This tells the story of a pretentious and deeply antisemitic writer/artist and the people around her at an artist residency. Lambs was loaded with potential, but once again went off in a million directions, with none of the through-lines being developed enough to intrigue. A 2.5 star

The Great Central Pacific Guano Co was, to my mind, the most traditionally structured story in the collection, though the subject matter was anything but traditional. Yes Maggie, Colonial white men suck both for their docility when challenged by equals and their brutality when surrounded by those perceived as lesser. Also, women working together instead of sitting around lamenting the status quo really can take care of business. 4-stars

Backcountry checked a lot of boxes for me. The story of a young adventurous woman who exists mostly through other people’s perceptions – or rather though her perception of other people’s perceptions. This sense of self (or lack of sense of self) leads her to make choices with regard to men based largely on a desire to prove something to herself and others. I know this woman (x100). This felt very real. But the story had a major flow issue. There was sort of an epilogue that really could and should have been linked to the rest of the story a bit more firmly. 4-stars.

That adds up to a 3.6. ( )

I have read Maggie Shipstead's 3 novels and they were all excellent. "The Great Circle" was a Booker Prize finalist and it was a great book. This book of short stories represent previous work from Shipstead spread out over 10 years. There were some excellent stories but overall this collection was not as impressive as her novels. Short stories need to engage you quickly and give you enough backstory to make them resonate. Although each story was creative there were some that seem to go nowhere. For the most part these were not happy stories and if you have not read Shipstead, I would read her novels first. If you enjoy them as I did then you should read this collection. From a business standpoint her publisher may have been trying to capitalize on the success of "The Great Circle" and get something out quickly and this material was available. Not all writers can do both short stories and novels. So far novels seems to be the best place for Shipstead's energy. ( )