Pulling no punches

Two daring short-story collections offer knockout reads

Friday, June 6, 2003

Rumble, Young Man, Rumble

By Benjamin Cavell (Alfred A. Knopf, 191 pages, $22).Grade: A

This debut collection of short stories by Benjamin Cavell is the literary equivalent of a right hook. It's devastatingly good.

In a prose style both deft and deliberate, Cavell explores what it means to be a male in modern America. Simply put, he drops you to your knees in the first round. It's nine tales about men wrestling with macho demons.

In Balls, Balls, Balls, a cocky sporting goods clerk meets his match when a real-life mercenary joins his paintball team. In All the Nights of the World, a young man brings his girlfriend home to meet his ex-pro football player father. The latter smiles and sizes her up like a side of beef.

Killing Time essays the anxiety-filled 24 hours before a prize fight, its characters frightened by the rage they carry within. A man contemplates killing his girlfriend's rich father in Evolution, yet the closer he gets to the actual deed (at her urging, it should be said), the lower his confidence falls. Plotting death in one's mind is easy; pulling the trigger is hard.

And so it goes for each of these dark orchids, in which men face their greatest fear - usually themselves. Cavell's prose is a series of short jabs. He uses economy of language to great effect. "You walk with your eyes down. You try to stay under the radar. You rely on the kindness of strangers," says his paranoid schizophrenic in The Death of Cool.

There is nothing gentle about Cavell's characters, whether it be a callow politician popping pills as he prepares to run for his father's vacated Senate seat, or two serial killers flirting with a waitress in Highway. Here, the short sentences and scrappy tone add up to some seriously creepy suspense.

This book owes its impact to both a diversity of subjects and Cavell's ease writing in many voices. He takes us inside his characters' heads, down long, uncomplicated corridors of contempt.

The final story in the collection shows Cavell at his best. The Ropes opens with a young boxer in a hospital bed after being beaten to a pulp. Told that his boxing days are over, he makes his way to the Martha's Vineyard home of his ex-fighter father. A few weeks to recuperate and he'll get on with his life. That's the plan. Until he meets a girl. A pretty girl with a drop-dead smile. A pretty girl who is engaged to someone else.

What is this fatal attraction between men and risk, that realm where machismo trumps common sense? In exploring this terrain, Cavell forgoes the safety of emotion. His characters are hard and unapologetic. More drops of blood are spilt than tears.

And that, in the end, is rather refreshing, a book of stories about people who don't want to talk things out, but who want to act.

And if those actions have consequences? They'll deal with it when the time comes. Real men don't fret about the future.

Reading Rumble, Young Man, Rumble is like going 12 rounds with a prizefighter. You're battered and bruised by the time it's over, but you've never felt more alive.

-- Mike Pearson

Jenny Shank's is a Denver short story writer who was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Mike Pearson is features editor for the Rocky Mountain News.

Ten Little Indians

By Sherman Alexie (Grove Press, 243 pages, $24) Grade: A

Sherman Alexie's new collection of stories, Ten Little Indians, proves once again that he is an absolutely fearless writer.

He isn't afraid to mock the habits of under-educated reservation Indians and the dewy-eyed liberals who romanticize them. He isn't afraid to write from the perspective of a character of a different gender or race.

He isn't afraid to let one of his characters speculate that not every victim of the September 11 attacks was "innocent," as they have been repeatedly described; the character says, "I knew one of those guys in the towers was raping his daughter." Most importantly, Alexie isn't afraid to depict the muck, ugliness and senseless cruelty of the world and make a joke about it.

Alexie's rich humor is perhaps the quality most indicative of his fearlessness, at least for a literary fiction writer of his stature. Among the short story writers regularly published in The New Yorker, for example, Alexie is one of the few who has anything funny to say, one of the few who doesn't seem to worry that readers won't take him seriously if he makes them laugh. Even Alexie's depressed characters are far from depressing.

In The Life And Times Of Estelle Walks Above, the narrator interrupts the story with a joke:

"Q: What's the difference between an Indian reservation and a racist, sexist, homophobic, white trash logging town entirely populated with the mutated children of married second cousins?

"A: The Indians have braids."

Like this joke, the nine stories in Ten Little Indians occupy the territory where brutal honesty, human imperfection and humor meet.

There's a great deal of love in them, too; the love of a son for his parents, the love of parents for their child, the love of husbands and wives for each other, and several characters' love for basketball.

In The Life And Times Of Estelle Walks Above, an Indian son reflects on his incomparable, somewhat flaky single mother who leads a women's group full of white ladies who adore her. He gives his mother an imaginary grade for her parenting performance: ". . . you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University, but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors."

None of Alexie's characters are saintly enough to matriculate at that particular institution, and that's what makes them endearing, despite their prickly ways. Most of Alexie's characters are Indians who excelled in school and moved to the city from the reservation, or who never grew up there at all.

Some, such as the college student in The Search Engine, are still clawing their way up, while others, such as the down-and-out ex-basketball star in What Ever Happened To Frank Snake Church? have fallen from former heights. Alexie joins each of them at a turning point in their lives, but none of these moments is the standard stuff of contemporary short fiction.

In Lawyer's League, Richard, the narrator, is a young political hotshot who aspires to become president, and explains his ethnic background in this way: "My father is an African-American giant who played Defensive End for the University of Washington Cougars and my mother is a petite Spokane Indian ballerina who majored in Dance at U-Dub, so, genetically speaking, I'm a graceful monster."

His crossroads moment has two facets: He meets a fetching white woman with whom he is so taken that he fantasizes about marriage, and he is provoked during a basketball game in a league for middle-aged lawyers.

He decides not to pursue a relationship with the woman because he says, "I knew I would never achieve my full potential as a public servant if I married a white woman. I would lose votes each time I kissed my wife in public . . ."

He isn't able to evaluate the future consequences of his actions so coolly in the heat of a basketball game, however. Alexie takes us into the literarily neglected world of the middle-aged men's basketball league in which, "Most of them played basketball like Ted Bundy, hiding a pathologically violent core beneath a handsome white-collar exterior." One of the lawyers goads Richard into a fight that could jeopardize his White House chances.

In this story and the others in Ten Little Indians, Alexie is unafraid to express ideas that most people would not admit to thinking, and to express them with such rare wit that the sentiments stay with the reader long after the book is closed.

-- Jenny Shank