Good Friday to you, Story366.
If you follow this blog at all, you should be able to pick up on what it is I do here. I offer a salutation of some sort, mix in some elevator talk about the weather or what’s going on in the world that day (though not today), then jump into something personal about myself, sort of a mini-diary. Then, in the second half of the entry, I get into the book and story of the day. So, it’s not purely a short story exercise—it’s personal, too. Maybe that makes this project a bit impure, if I ever wanted to call what I do “reviewing,” but the project is what it is, is what I want to be, and I’m okay with that.
Sometimes I do a book and not much is going on in the world except I’m living my life, raising my kids, trying to be a good citizen. I’ll talk about a news story, relay an anecdote, or offer commentary. Sometimes, though, and entry is tied, forever, to something that happened on a particular day in my life. Yesterday, my report on Leigh Camacho Rourks included a 980-word description of me alphabetizing my books. What does that have to do with her fine collection? Nothing.
Sometimes a book inspires something particular, like Ron MacLean’s book the other day. His awesome title, We Might as Well Light Something on Fire, incited me to tell my arsonist story. My little tale didn’t have anything to do with this book—I never even came upon that titular line in any of his stories. It was a connection, I went with it, and now that anecdote and his book are linked forever here on my blog.
I reviewed my friend Roy Kesey’s collection on November 2, 2016, which is the day the Cubs won the World Series. The first half of the entry was more or less me live-streaming the game. When I saw Roy the next time, at AWP in DC, I think, he came up to me and said something like, “Wow, Mike, I didn’t even know my book was about the Chicago Cubs.” Roy was kidding. He’s funny. And mostly handsome.
But that’s what Story366 is. While I’ve not been recruited to review for The New York Times, I’ve not heard any complaints, either.
Today, Ethan Chatagnier, whom I don’t know but just friended on FB in anticipation of this entry, just happens to fall on a bad day in the household: The Karen‘s mom passed away yesterday. I was just about done with the Rourks entry when the news came. Later in the day, not wanting to get into it—there was a moritorium on revealing this info for most of the day, as Karen couldn’t get a hold of one of her sisters—I wrapped it up as it was. Not that my sister-in-law reads my blog every day, but still, I wasn’t going to risk that. So instead of any grave revelation, I posted the Rourks review with the now silly-seeming alphabetization intro and that was that.
Even today, I’m not going to go into too much detail on my mother-in-law’s passing, but I do want to mention it. Along with everything else this blog is, it also does serve as my diary. I would be remiss to skip it. Elsie Craigo ws a beautiful, fierce, and loving woman, and she most notoriously gave me, and the world, her daughter. For that, she should have won some sort of special Nobel Prize of her conributions to humanity. I will forever be greatful to her, for cultivating my favorite human into the person she is, the person so many people love.
Ethan Chatagnier’s Warnings From the Future, out in 2018 from Acre Books, gives us today’s focus, “As Long as the Laughter.” I read a few of the stories from the collection and liked them all, but I’m focusing on this one because I think it’s pretty funny, was my favorite of the three, and also gives us the titular line from the collection, “warnings from the future” (and in fact, was titled just that when it was published in Michigan Quarterly Review).
“As Long as the Laughter” is about Dov, a forty-something stand-up comic whose star is rising. After a long and tough career trying to make it, he’s in the second season of a hit sitcom and his HBO special is about to air. People recognize him in the streets. They ask him to say famous lines and they relay their own jokes, trying to make him laugh. At the end of his sets, they chant, “Dov! Dov! Dov!” so he comes out for encores. He’s living the dream.
Dov, like a lot of the great ones, has his demons. He doesn’t freebase cocaine or philander or abuse staff members. Dov’s problem is his act, which has been, at its most successful, him making fun of himself, how miserable he is. He pokes at his weight, how he doesn’t enjoy sex anymore, and that his best form of happiness is accepting unhappiness. When working on a new set, he spends thirty minutes in front of a mirror, naked, thinking of disgusting analogies for his body—he settles on uncooked sourdour, both in look and smell. Audiences roar, he gets paid, then he ventures deeper into misery to mine material.
Along the way, another character, a twenty-year-old attractive woman, Jenna, sets her sights on sleeping with Dov. While Chatagnier never admits it in his narration, she’s obsessed, for whatever reason, with what Dov is. Yes, she’s a fan—she laughs at his bit—but she’s taken it on herself to do this, to find him after a show, follow him out to a bar after, and seduce him. Dov, because he breaks down everything that happens to him in search of a joke, knows what she is, tries to talk himself out of it—it’s got to be some sort of paternity stunt, some kind of starfucker quest and he’s a box to check. He tries to talk her out of it, too—he goes into his sourdough routine—but this doesn’t deter her. “I want to fuck you,” she whispers into his ear. Dov knows all kinds of reasons he should run from this situation, but at the same time, also wonders if his entire life, all his hard work, all his success, hasn’t been preparing him for this exact moment, for this exact opportunity. He may never get another chance to sleep with such a young, attractive woman. And really, why wouldn’t he just do it? He’s famous and these are the spoils.
I’m oversimplifying this story too much, I think, by making this about Dov’s encounter with Jenna. This happens—in present tense, in future tense, from Dov’s perspective, from Jenna’s perspective. Really, though, the story is more about Dov, how his brain works, how he deconstructs everything. That’s where he gets his jokes. And, he can’t help it. At some point, Jenna just disappears from the story, without any explanation, and Dov goes in another direction, almost into stream of consciousness. Maybe Jenna really happened. Or maybe she’s something in his head—the tense and POV shifts make anything hard to pinpoint 100 percent—the sex fantasy of a chubby, middle-aged guy who gets famous. I don’t think that’s it, but I don’t not think it’s not impossible, either.
The other stories I read from the book include “Miracle Fruit” and “Smaller Tragedies.” “Miracle Fruit” is about this scientist who works for a lab in Nebraska, in a dystopian near-future where all the plants in the world have been minimalized and those remaining have been reengineered into sweeter, more delicious and marketable foods. This has made most plants in the world extinct, save the enormous stash in one seed bank in France, which has seeds from pretty much every plant ever. Our scientist’s lab has bought this seed bank so they can engineer the bestest and sweetest-tasting stuff and make a gazillion dollars—everything else they plan to burn. “Smaller Tragedies” is about a photo of a kid at an earthquake site, standing on a road amidst crunched cars and strewn strawberries—and it’s about the photographer who took it and her family, how the rising fame of the photo has affected them over the years.
Every story I read here was completely different in terms of characters and plot, almost as if conceived by different authors. There are similarities, though, in voice and style that unify them—Chatagnier’s psychic distance feels far and high, as if narrated from a ledge atop a tall mountain at the edge of town. This gives him license, it seems, to dip in and out of different characters’ heads, to trail off on speculations, and divert into non-sequiturs. His creativity is as eclectic as any writer I’ve covered, but he’s got this voice down, an original read that challenged and satisfied me at the same time.
Warnings From the Future is Ethan Chatagnier’s debut and it’s a strikingly impressive one. It’s also the first book I’ve read from Acre, the newish press from the Cincinnati Review people (so you know it’s good!). If this is any indication, we have a lot to look forward to from both of them.
Story366 