Things You Should Know: A Collection Of Stories (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
Reconozco que probablemente leer los cuentos de A.M. Homes después de haber leído los de Amy Hempel es un poco injusto, porque las comparaciones pueden ser odiosas y crueles. Aún así, cuando en una colección de cuentos no hay ninguno que me produzca auténtica envidia ni ninguno que hubiera deseado poder escribir yo, es que algo va mal. Confieso que ya antes había intentado leer ‘Cosas que debes saber’ pero había fracasado, aunque ahora veo que (en parte) mi problema era que empecé por el cuento más desagradable pero con el título más atrayente para mí (el de los presuntos niños prodigio). Me ha desagradado tanto o incluso más que la primera vez. La verdad, no me apetece para nada leer un cuento cuyo clímax sucede cuando un gilipollas abusa de una chica y se le mea encima. Éste es mi mayor problema con A.M. Homes que a veces parece que quiere ser desagradable sólo para ser desagradable, de forma totalmente gratuita, o como mucho para de pasada resultar polémica, que es algo que siempre queda muy guay, pero en el fondo yo no veo nada detrás. Otro cuento también bastante desagradable es el de la mujer que se insemina ella solita con el semen que recoge de los preservativos tirados por otras parejas. En fin, se supone que la pobre mujer tuvo un accidente muy grave y que tenemos que compadecernos por ella y todo el rollo, pero la verdad es que toda la historia me parece chapucera, gratuita y manipuladora. Luego hay un par de cuentos con una shapeshifter, que creo que pretenden ser poéticos y tal, pero que a mí me han parecido ridículos y tediosos. Después, hay unos cuantos relatos que no están mal, pero que son bastante olvidables. A veces me da la sensación que para que un editor te publique un libro de relatos tiene que haber uno sobre el cáncer y otro sobre parejas que se rompen. Aquí A.M. Homes ha unido los dos tópicos en un solo cuento y el resultado no está mal, pero ya se ha hecho antes millones de veces y no creo que aporte nada nuevo. También está el tópico del hombre que quiere morir hasta que tiene una experiencia en que la está a punto de palmar y luego se da cuenta que quiere vivir. También con una serie de imágenes desagradables de lo más gratuitas y todo él demasiado previsible. Hasta aquí ha habido tres párrafos de cosas que no me han gustado, ahora viene uno de cosas que sí que me han gustado. Como veis no son muchas pero espero que notéis la delicadeza de ponerlas al final para que sea con lo que os quedéis. Os juro que yo no quiero ser cruel de forma gratuita. Vamos allá. Me gusta el cuento sobre el niño que va a pasar las vacaciones en casa de su padre divorciado, pero que en realidad se pasa más tiempo en casa de los vecinos que son una familia normal y por eso los adora, porque está cansado de las pijerías de su madre y lo alternativo que es su padre, tiene un punto de nostalgia y de final de infancia que está realmente conseguido. El del presidente Reagan jubilado y aquejado de alzheimer es original, divertido y con un punto amargo, realmente bueno y la verdad es que me encantan todos los relatos que ficcionalizan vidas de políticos (estoy pensando básicamente en el ‘Lyndon’ de David Foster Wallace). También me ha gustado mucho ‘Remedios’, que es muy Carver, muy “en apariencia cuenta algo banal pero dice mucho”. Y el mejor creo que es el que da título al libro; es evocador, breve, simple e inteligente. Resumiendo, de 11 cuentos, cuatro me han gustado (pero sin llegar a entusiasmarme), tres no me han hecho ni fu ni fa, y los restantes los he odiado. Demasiado poco para poder decir que el libro me ha gustado. Aún así, me alegro de haberlo leído/terminado, haberme fabricado mi propia opinión y poder pasar a otra cosa.
There are only a few writers who do broken people quite as well as Homes – although both Barbara Gowdy and Jayne Anne Phillips come close. Many of Homes’s characters are slightly off kilter, alienated, uncertain of their place in the world either by virtue of age or by changed circumstance, in many cases they feel stuck, trapped or lost but unable to work out what to do. This is what provides the thematic core of this excellent collection of stories, many of which teeter on the brink of the grotesque and as a consequence are both poignant/tragic and funny at once (although not in a laugh out loud kind of funny, but a kind of tristesse – perhaps in this case best understood as a kind of melancholic comedy/absurdity). One of Homes’s great strengths is her ability to write children and adolescents (this is the better parallel with Phillips) in a way that blends naivety with worldliness, liminality and out-of-placeness with plans and desires (these complex children appear throughout her fiction), providing the core of 4 of the stories in this collection. The other recurring motif in her fiction – most obviously in Music for Torching – is domestic dystopia, central to several other pieces in this collection. In both these motifs there is a powerful sense of people trying to be somewhere or something else – the character who wants to die, so he says, but in the end wants to live but doesn’t know how; the woman who pursues a unique path to conception, inspired by her grandmother who “would never have gotten married if [she] could have gotten out of it”, or the character in the (very brief) gorgeous title story who is sure of having missed the day in 4th grade when the teacher gave out the list of ‘things you should know’ and whose life is therefore incomplete. There are two stories that don’t quite fit this framework – but fit the book; ‘The Whiz Kids’ – less dystopian than downright bleakly malignant, and ‘The Weather Outside is Sunny and Bright’ about a shape-shifting forensic architect. In a strange way, these two-that-don’t-quite-fit remind us of the richness of Homes’s oeuvre, and shake us as readers (or perhaps me as a reader) out of the view that she is an author of slightly discombobulated families. But perhaps the most potent stories are ot the ones of not-quite-fitting but of all to believable tragedy – the 12 year old boys whose summer is disrupted by death, not of someone they know, but by someone they know, and the closing story, ‘The Former First Lady and the Football Hero’ – a not even disguised tale of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s, which includes perhaps the exchange of the collection; he asks if he had an affair, she replies, ‘Iran Contra?’.As with so much of the rest of Homes’s work (including her work on The L Word), this collection is gorgeous, poignant and a reminder that she is not just, as Zadie Smith once described her ‘a writer’s writer’, but one of the great contemporary authors who deserves to be much more widely read. These are what the short story should be, powerful, sharply insightful and more than just a little disturbing!
What do You think about Things You Should Know: A Collection Of Stories (2003)?
An interesting collection of short stories from AM Homes, though I enjoyed her earlier collection, The Safety of Objects, a little bit more. Georgica is a beautifully strange tale of a woman who continually tries to inseminate herself in a most unconventional way. While what occurs in the story is truly bizarre, Homes writes this story in a way that transports the reader to a different dimension. My favorite story was The Former First Lady and the Football Hero. This story is Homes imagining of what life must have been like for President Reagan and wife Nancy during his later years dealing with Alzheimer's. The story is both humorous and heartbreaking as we follow Nancy Reagan dealing with the Secret Service and going online to network anonymously with other people dealing with dementia, and occasionally flirting with a man on an online site. Anyone who has dealt with these issues in their family will relate. I had actually read her short story, Do Not Disturb, last summer when it was listed by One Story as one of the best short stories ever. From the opening lines, this brutal story about a loveless marriage is filled with palpable tension. The story moves quickly, jumping from one fraught scene to another. A.M. Home adds in moments of humor to keep the story moving and to balance the horribleness of it all. The husband tries one last ditch effort to find tenderness by taking his sick wife to Paris. Once there, he realizes there is no chance to save their marriage. I won’t spoil the ending here.If you are a fan of short stories, this collection is worth reading.
—Jim Breslin
I typically like short fiction, it just "works" for me and I find short stories the perfect bath time accompaniment so I pick up a lot of short story anthologies. This one, however, blew me away. Each story has some resonant themes that make me curious if it is the author herself (this is the first of her books that I have read) or whether it was a phase. Either way, I immensely enjoyed these stories. I thought I'd read maybe one or two, then wash my hair. Instead, the water went cold, my toes turned to prunes and I read cover-to-cover in one sitting/soaking.
—Amelia Chameleon
Sharp collection of short stories focusing on people in unbearable situations or relationships. The one that stuck with me is "Do Not Disturb" about a doctor dying of cancer and her husband who was obsessed with death before her diagnosis. Neither fits the usual profile of "noble patient" or "loving spouse." The sick wife is furious because she can't control her own illness as she can those of her patients and the husband can't connect with her. They take an impulsive trip to Paris and the story ends with bizarrely funny encounter in their hotel room. Nothing has changed, she is still dying and bitchy, he is still pathetic. They can't stay together and they can't leave each other. I also liked "Rockets Round the Moon" about two 12-year-old boys whose summer is smashed to bits by a tragic accident.
—David Sheward
