| Short,
dark >> Mark
Winegardner paints funny pictures
Harry Kreevich, Cleveland bowling alley owner, has never gotten around to visiting the rock ’n’ roll hall of fame. But he does manage to make it to his daughter’s latest art show in New York, and he finds himself a little uncomfortable there. She’d warned him that recently she’d been doing mostly nudes. “So,” he said, “there’s a long tradition, nudes,” But she didn’t warn him she had been focusing exclusively on penises. “Close-up, painted in shades of gray. Erect and limp, all races, circumcised and not, dangling from squatting position, fat men and thin. One penis was so alarmingly small Harry wondered if it was a freak. The paint was thick, purposefully cracked.” As small-town as Harry is, he still instinctively recognizes that these are good, and that they will make a name for his daughter. “People you know?” he asks, trying to sound cosmopolitan. Mark Winegardner’s first book of short stories, That’s True of Everybody, is not unlike the show. There’s something quite familiar at the core of these narratives that focus mostly on the lives and loves of Midwesterners, and something a bit perverse. Winegardner presents a remarkable range of characters: a teenage girl, a lawnmower operator, a slutty National Book award winner, a failed novelist, a gifted basketball player, a kid who grows up in his grandfather’s drive-in, to name a few. He writes with charm, warmth and sophistication. But you sometimes get the feeling that the quirkiness is being laid on a little thick, and that the occasional character or situation is “purposefully cracked,” as though faux distress, now overused just about anywhere you go, is creeping into contemporary literature. This is truer of some stories than others. “Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home,” Harry’s story, is as artfully quirky as it is stubbornly homey. Like Drew Carey gone to college. The story centres around the disappearance of Harry’s new lane girl, a big blonde who, after two weeks of work, one day simply disappears. Harry’s disappointment and longing symbolize the “nice guys finish last” malaise that haunts his life. There’s something courageous about his decision to hang one of his daughter’s penis paintings in his living room, to show the dates he meets through personal ads. There’s also something sweet about his conviction that one day a woman will hear him say “what I like about it [the penis painting] is the light and the space and also how it is not austere” and understand what he means. At the same time, he’s nuts. “Ace of Hearts,” however, is a gem. Told from the point of view of Tess, a 14-year-old girl whose mother has just bolted, it beautifully captures the best of times, worst of times puzzle of adolescence. Tess has been left with her sexy, gambling car-salesman father, who’s having an affair with the landlord’s wife, Constance. Rakish ways notwithstanding, he’s a far better parent than her mother. Even Constance is an improvement. They’re all the subject of village gossip, but as Constance explains to Tess, “That’s the difference between adults and children… Children want to fit in. This town is infested with hundreds of small-minded, gigantic old children.” When Tess asks, “So what do adults want?” Constance replies, “We don’t know… that’s what makes us adults.” At their best, these are
stories about adults who don’t know what they want. They feel
like children, and often act like them, but may not even be aware of
how mature they really are. At their worst, the stories feel like a
poor man’s Lorrie Moore, the great American short story writer
to whom all quirky, dark stories must now be compared. Winegardner has
already made a name for himself as a writer with Crooked River Burning,
a novel about Cleveland, and The Veracruz Blues, a novel about baseball.
That’s True of Everybody will contribute to his growing reputation,
and at least one story is a hall of famer. : |
