2025 Readings 7

 For some reason I don't read a lot of short stories, although I don't know why. I endlessly go on about how important Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio was to me (and I should give it a reread this year), and in many ways that's as much a collection of short stories as it is a novel, or at least a series of short stories that add up to a novel. For that matter, several years ago I read, and loved - and actually used part of in class, Jhumpa Lahiri's brilliant collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Nevertheless, for some reason I don't read much short fiction, and this needs to be addressed this year and moving forward. I'm bringing this all up because I just finished The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. Even if you take into account that I grew up in Indiana and are thus very poorly educated, it's difficult to reconcile how little I know and how little I've read (let alone how little I've accomplished in my career). Somehow, I had never heard of Breece D'J Pancake, an extraordinary talent whose life was cut short when he committed suicide at age twenty-six in 1979. On some level I'm sure the stories resonated with me because they're all set in rural West Virginia in the 1970s, and thus it reminds me of Indiana during the same time period, all the ugliness and ignorance and poverty and hopelessness. Several of the stories - "A Room Forever," "The Honored Dead," "In the Dry," and "First Day of Winter" - are just a punch in the gut, brutal and beautiful. I told my friend Mike Kelly, who was familiar with the collection, that it read like a bleaker Drive-By Truckers album. I told him that one of the things that is most painful about reading the stories is that you know that almost everyone of the characters would vote for Trump. He replied, completely on point, with the exception of the smart ones who die.

I think my favorite story is "A Room Forever," which is about a young man in a horrible West Virginia river town (probably the WV equivalent of Lawrenceburg, Indiana) on New Year's Day, waiting to get back on the tug Delmar for a month. He's killing time in a horrible $8 a night room, drinking and sleeping with a younger teenage prostitute. Here's the end of the story:

  "I dress and go out again. It is still raining and the cold pavement shines with new ice. Between the buildings the bums are sleeping in the trash they have piled up, and I think about some nut in California who cut winos' throats, but I can't see the percentage. The stumblebums are like Prince Albert, they ran out of luck, hit the skids.

  I turn onto First Avenue, walk slowly by the row of crowded taverns, look in the windows at all the lucky people getting partied up for New Year's. Then I see her sitting at a table near the back door. I go in, take a stool at the bar, order a whiskey, neat. The smoke cloud is heavy, but I see her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. From the way her mouth is hanging limp I see she is pretty drunk. I don't guess she knows she can't drink her way out of this.

  I look around. All these people have come down from their flops because there are no parties for them to go to. The are strangers who play a little pool or pinball, drink a little booze. All year they grit their teeth - they pump gas and wait tables and screw chippies and bait queers, and they don't like any of it, but they know they are lucky to get it.

  I look for her in the mirror but she is gone. I would have seen her going out the front, so I head for the back door to look for her. She is sitting against a building in the rain, passed out cold. When I shake her, I see that she has cut both wrists down to the leaders, but the cold rain has clotted the blood so that only a little oozes out when I move her. I go back inside.

  'There's some girl out back tried to kill herself.'

  Four guys at the bar run out to her, carry her inside. The bartender grabs a phone. He says to me, 'Do you know her?'

  I say, 'No, I just went for some air.' I go on out the door.

  The bartender yells, 'Hey, buddy, the cops'll want to see you; hey, buddy . . .'

  I walk along the avenue thinking how shit always sinks, and how all these towns dump their shit for the river to push it down to the delta. Then I think about that girl sitting in the alley, sitting in her own slough, and I shake my head. I have not gotten that low.

  I stop in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going.  But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it. It's always there, you just look at somebody and they give you a look like the Wrath of God. I turn toward the docks, walk down to see if the Delmar maybe put in early."

Highly recommended, and I'm definitely looking forward to reading the collection again. That's definitely one of the markers of a truly great work of fiction: as soon as you finish the last page you're already planning your reread.