The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

by Elliot Perlman

The stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Australia, Literature, Literary Fiction, Book Club, 21st Century

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Elliot Perlman is an Australian author and barrister. He has written two novels and one short story collection. His work "condemns the economic rationalism that destroys the humanity of ordinary people when they are confronted with unemployment and poverty". This is not surprising in a writer who admires Raymond Carver and Graham Greene because they "write with quite a strong moral centre and a strong sense of compassion". However, he says that "Part of my task is to entertain readers. I don't want it to be propaganda at all. I don't think that for something to be political fiction it has to offer an alternative, I think just a social critique is enough". He describes himself, in fact, as being interested in "the essence of humanity" and argued that exploring this often means touching on political issues.

Perlman often uses music, and song lyrics, in his work to convey an idea or mood, or to give a sense of who a character is. However, he recognises that this "is a bit of a risk because the less familiar the reader is with the song, the smaller the pay off.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm so used to reading a certain type of book that i always forget there are writers out there writing about ordinary situations, quietly. these are stories for adults, like the way people used to make movies for adults. i didn't like the earlier ones, but the longer ones at the end were better. i am looking forward to reading his longer novel. and, yes...

come to my blog!

[Mon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review in Elliot Perlman's style:

I liked the book. She didn't, but she lent it to me anyway. I offered her another chance to read it again, but she was always working. In fact, it is not too dramatic to say that I enjoyed the book immensely. But she never understood me. When I think about it now I realised that I have invented her image alone. When we first started we would read together. I didn't think she enjoyed her administration work. But now I think she takes comfort in it. I'll read the book again, without her. The hardcover version weights down my bag, and I can't carry it to the office without her noticing. She went through phases. A while ago she was fond of books with green covers. One night in bed, I asked if she could make me a cup of hot chocolate and she said she had to finish a book of poetry. Having turned the radio off, I wondered if she had ever woken up with an inexplicable panic inside her.




Wait, remind me, what am I writing about?

[Julia Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take your time, and take it one at a time.

This book, as you may have seen took me from July to tonight, March 9, to finish.
It is not a book you pick up, and read a bit each night before you go to sleep.
My recommendation is to take it one story at a time, each one intensely.
Do not be discouraged if there is a story you do not like. This is the way of short story compilations.
I am relieved to have this book be over. Each story has been milling in my mind for the past 8 months, and now for a long time, I suspect the memory of these stories will not go away. This is why I give it five stars, the only reason why I give any book five stars. The memory will not go away.

[Books Ring Mah Bell · Rating 2 out of 5]

My husband picked up this book, looked at the title, then to me and said, "Whiskey dick?"

Nope.

Whiskey dick, while a valid reason for not coming, does not appear in this book.

A collection of nine short stories... some of them I hated, like Good Morning, Again, although it was well written, I just didn't care.

Some I liked. (I was only in a childish way) A father takes the heat for his child...

I only loved one of them; The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine.

In The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine, a lawyer knocked up his beloved. She thinks he did it on purpose and leaves him. His heart is broken. This was my favorite part of the book: I have been alone before, but now it will be worse. I am hungry for you, for your voice, your touch, your hand on my face. It is as real is anything I have ever experienced, and nothing - no sleep, no conversation, no idea or image - can hold this hunger at bay, not even for a moment. .... This will not die for me. Having known you as I have, I will always want to know how you are, what you are doing. This will not dissipate for me. But you, who are so much more skilled in the art of putting up walls, you will have managed some distance already.

Ouch. Heartbreak is more sad than a whiskey dick.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but it really should have been called "instances of melancholy" or "characters filled with sadness" or "a story filled with the day-to-day despair of life, followed by another"

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a bit concerned about this after reading a bunch of negative reviews on here, expecting perhaps some unpolished early writing exercises. I need not have worried. This is a great collection of stories.

Perlman is obviously at his 'best' (which you may or may not like) when he has hundreds of pages to stretch out in, but each of these stories captures some facet of his writing style that I enjoy, from complicated ambiguity to contrived connectedness. He lays the legal stuff on a bit thick at times, but otherwise, a brilliant and enjoyable collection. Looking forward to starting on The Street Sweeper...

[Daniel C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perlman's writing style is the kind of deceptively simple literary pulp that might finally bring intelligent books back into vogue. The mass-produced mush that often clots the shelves of bookstores has its place, but it has also made works of genius tiresome affairs for most people. No one likes to be talked down to, least of all by an inanimate object.

Perlman's writing follows in the footsteps of authors like Cheever and Carver, men who throw their ten cents in but make it look like two. These are the kinds of works that don't fly over the head, but that are also much deeper and more dangerous than they initially seem. As a result, people don't feel alienated by the text, nor do the intelligentsia feel slighted by the material.

Short stories are tough acts for novelists, though. Even if Perlman's deft strokes show in the tales of this book, his limitations are likewise revealed. How to contain, in a handful of pages, the breadth and beauty that these guys more artfully employ in hundreds of pages or more? Below is a brief list of the stories, in order of accomplishment.

1 Star - MANSLAUGHTER - An overlong excuse for Perlman to use the technical knowledge he has gained in his work as a barrister. The fluctuating narratorial threads and the ambivalent emotion of the piece showcase the post-modern emotion behind concepts like "guilt" and "justice," but the overall product is bloated, unwieldy, and boring in the way of uber-technical curios.

2 Stars - THE HONG KONG FIR DOCTRINE & SPITALNIC'S LAST YEAR - Both of these are brief character pieces that suffer from opposite maladies. The first has an ending that is far too on the nose; the strength of the metaphor that Perlman employs (the title's doctrine) is sapped by his overt use of it. The second, about a grad student with lousy luck (mostly in love), has an ending so foggy and unrefined that it makes a mockery of the word "last" in the title. If that's where the impetus of the story is to lie, in the word "last," then I'd suggest the story didn't need to be quite so deliberate with its details.

3 Stars - YOUR NIECE'S SPEECH NIGHT & A TALE IN TWO CITIES - The former is a stream-of-consciousness look at the thoughts of a man who is jilted by a duplicitous lover. The story is told in the fashion that Perlman seems to enjoy the most (i.e. to "you"), and although it is a remarkably intense piece, the narrator's muddled mess of a mind makes it hard to read. Ultimately, the monologue collapses under the cleverness of the plot and the stupidity (or ignorance) of the main character. The latter story is a brief treatise on the historical persecution of Russian jews mingled with a tongue-in-cheek detective story about a missing brother. Both stories have Perlman's flair for language and revelation, but the two threads do NOT mix well at all. Perlman is good, but not good enough to flop back and forth between weighty social portents and breezy barroom jokes.

4 Stars - GOOD MORNING, AGAIN & THE REASONS I WON'T BE COMING & I WAS ONLY IN A CHILDISH WAY CONNECTED TO THE ESTABLISHED ORDER - The mental flotsam that fills a man's head in the post-dawn hours after a one-night stand. The simple and somehow unsurprising steps that lead numbly and quietly to a seemingly happy couple's separation. The steady wasting away of a poet's sanity and the things it takes for him to find his own heart again. Solidly driven, all of these pieces, and containing the multi-layered punch of Perlman's seductive prose.

5 Stars - IN THE TIME OF DINOSAURS - Writing from the perspective of a young boy who watches his family fall apart, the pathos and tender withdrawl of this story is eloquently realized. No maudlin strings are pulled, and emotion is consciously toned down, so that the young child's experiences seem ever more present. Perlman refuses to inject his narrator's world with the judgements and understandings of a man more mature, allowing his readers to do that for him. The effect is stunning.

It's the good and the bad. The dull and the sparkling. Short story collections are often hit and miss. As far as this book's score, well, you do the math.

[Trevor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went to Primary School with Mr Perlman and we were quite good friends until we went to different high schools and drifted apart.

He has done very well for himself as a writer and has even had a film made of one of his novels. I haven't read that novel, or any of his novels - I made what may have been a mistake and read these stories first. I felt they were pretentious and quite badly written – so haven’t been able to bring myself to read more of his stuff. Other people I know love him and he did give a very good speech against the anti-trade union laws in Australia – so that does win him quite a few Brownie points.

I couldn't say I liked any of these stories. The last one in the collection is the best sustained piece of fiction, but it says such silly things about Jews in the Soviet Union - about kids vomiting at Lenin's tomb, for example - that just made the whole thing seem more like propaganda than fiction. But I did quite like the female character in this one. Many of his characters were, well, hardly there. The narrator of this story, for example, is a bit of a joke character – which is a pity as it takes away from some of the virtues of this story.

There is another story in which a lover is repeatedly quoting from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that really irritated me – to the point where I felt someone really should have advised Elliot not to put this story in the collection.

I would hate to think that I don’t like his writing because he is a successful writer and I sat behind him at primary school, but I don’t like his writing – and it is hard to know if that is jealousy or justified.

[Liza Burman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoy Perlman's quiet writing style. Small observations and clean descriptions. The wow factor is just in that, the sheer simplicity.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good read; at times bleak. My fave of the stories centres on poetry. Stylishly written, but at times, for me, falls into literary self-consciousness.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrowed Bryan's promo copy of Perlman's first collection of short stories (originally published before Seven Types of Ambiguity and brought to America after that novel's success). The collection, though not without promise, lacks energy. There's something wan and lackluster about many of these stories.

The best are In the Time of the Dinosaur and Manslaughter. In Dinosaur a young boy tells the story of his parents' divorce, although he's mostly preoccupied with his report on dinosaurs. Manslaughter hints at Ambiguity with its use of multiple voices to tell a jig-saw story and with its ... well, ambiguity. One man kills another. Testimony is heard in court. The jurors visit the scene of the crime. But do we really know what happened? And what influence has someone far from the action brought to bear?

I also liked I Was Only in a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order, a slightly melodramatic tale of an ineffectual man who efficiently sacrifices himself to save his son.

A Tale in Two Cities skews noirish elements (a detective looking for a dame's missing brother) with humor (the inexperienced, unlicensed PI is just winging it) and history (the dame is a Russian immigrant, her PI swain has a recovering crack addict brother and a father who survived the Holocaust).

Quotable
You were trying to tell me something and I was trying to tell you something else. We didn't trust each other and that was reason enough to make each of us right.

[Alex S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Worth the price of the paperback, if only for three or four particularly good. Most of the stries, unfortunately, while they're not necessarily bad, just aren't all that interesting.

I don't think I gave quite so discerning a read as it maybe deserved, but it seemed that a recurring theme was that of intimate relationships turning out not to be quite what they appeared to be or what one would expect them to be. And not in any extravagant way, just sorta musing on the mundane: after being married for many years a poet finds that his wife has changed into a completely different woman so gradually that he hasn't noticed until it's too late and she hates him; a little boy muses over how his neighbor's parents fight constantly without realizing that his own parents are having problems; a college undergrad falls in and out of relationships, investing himself into other people under the presumption that they have certain feelings for him when they don't; things like that.

Far and away, the best two stories of the collection are "Spitalnic's Last Year," and "I Was Only in a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order," and, so far as I can tell, they do the best job at conveying the collection's theme. That amounts to about forty or fifty really good pages, while the rest is really kinda mediocre.

[S'hi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took a long time to get into any of these stories. In fact, the only reason I kept reading at all was because it was the only I book I had with me on public transport between different appointments. I stuck with a story until almost at a destination, only to find I didn’t really want to continue it. Put the bookmark at the beginning of the next story and started that on the next journey.

Then finally on p.127 I read: “I have been alone before but this is worse because now I have your to remember and nothing like you to look forward to.”

I didn’t really get much else out of this particular story, but I liked the sentiment and how it was worked as a reflection of greater things. It took me somewhere else.

By this stage I was about to look out of windows rather than read. But that line convinced me to read a little further.

Then I came across “I was in a childish way connected to the established order.” Here I found some common ground, some familiar characters and sentiments of friends long gone. But a familiar terrain as well in looking at things differently from within the walls of institutions. Here, finally, was literature among a group of short stories. Directions opened up, and more than the narrator’s voice could be heard.

I liked it.

I didn’t read any more. But I will try another of Perlman’s longer novels now. I was almost ready to give up on him.

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book consisted of 9 short stories. One of which was interesting with a decent ending, one of which was semi-interesting with a bad ending (and by bad I mean not good reading material, not sad or incomplete) and 7 that were pretty much terrible. In several of the stories the author's pretentiousness in wanting to sound extremely intelligent interfered with him making sense at all. In reading all of the reviews on the back and the one blatantly displayed on the front, I couldn't help but feel that he knows a lot of people who owe him favors. The title story, the reasons I won't be coming, was so disappointing for such a great title. Blah.

[Terri]

I had mixed reactions to this collection. I enjoyed the first piece, "Your niece's speech night" but found the ending unsatisfying, a complaint I often have with short stories.
The next 5 stories didn't engage me at all. It wasn't until I got toward the end of the book where the stories were longer that I began to enjoy it, mostly "I was only in a childish way connected to the established order" and "A tale in two cities". I can never resist Russian poetry or Stalin-influenced fiction.
The only reason I purchased this was because I enjoyed Three Dollars so much, usually I steer clear of short stories. Ultimately I'm glad I read it.

[Faye Rahman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I skipped a few stories simply because I honestly do not get what the stories are about and they are just too boring to continue. Like after a few pages I begin to think to myself "what the hell am I reading!?".

However stories like Again in the Time of Dinosaur, I was only in a Childish Way connected to the Established Order, Spiltanic's Last Year and A Tale of Two cities (my favourite among all) are very good and page turner. I do appreciate the writer trying to write about different genre in a very indifferent way, somehow I find the stories (that I like) are powerful and highly interesting. 3 stars because some stories are just blerghh.

[AuthorsOnTourLive! · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Reasons I Won't Be Coming is Perlman's new collection of smart and thoughtful short stories. They explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students and murderers. Witty, vulnerable and honest, they display the same preoccupations that made Perlman's novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, one of the most notable publications of 2004.

We met Elliot Perlman when he visited the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. You can listen to him talk about The Reasons I Won't Be Coming here: http://www.authorsontourlive.com/?p=46

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out great and promising. I loved the short stories at the beginning - the one about the little boy and dinosaurs in particular. The longer stories at the end dragged on. I felt like Perlman had put blinders on me so I couldn't see the whole picture. I kept thinking I had missed something because I didn't understand what was going on sometimes. His ability to condense the story was limited.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm always impressed by well written short stories, especially when they end up being as satisfying as a novel. I loved most of the stories in this boook (some were better than others, as with any collection). I actually didn't even know they were short stories when I picked it up - I ordered because I loved his novel Seven Types of Ambiguity and Carla gave this one four stars. It did not disappoint. I am thinking of recommending it for book club. Sort of a different type of book....

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a masterful book. I found myself sucked into each of the stories. The characters were real, and complex. Each story felt like a whole, complete little world and the author polished them up to show us. I don't like short stories usually, because they frequently feel somehow incomplete, but these were whole in and of themselves. The language is elegant and yet I didn't get wrapped up in it - it just flowed along perfectly. How can I explain - these are verbal tone poems.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perfect book to get the tears to flow when nothing else will do. Only need to read one or two of the stories before everything feels somehow resolved. The stories have a poignant sadness yet there always seems to be a point or two in each story that brings a smile or laugh with ironies or situations that somehow remind of endearing memories; relationships that will never be forgotten and can never be replaced.

[Lauren McGrath]

The first and last stories in this collection were my favorite, but not necessarily for the content or even a level of maintained interest. Perlman successfully creates unique, but cohesive voices for characters in a variety of troubled situations. Fear and honesty are prevalent in these voices and the characters had an impressive "real" quality. If you could read a stranger's thoughts, it would look like Perlman's writing.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed these stories, but I was hoping for a little more after "Seven Types of Ambiguity." The stories were smart, but some of them perhaps a little too much so. Some went on longer than it felt they should and some seemed more full of themselves than the need to get something across. "A Tale in Two Cities" is some really nice writing though, and even if I expected more that doesn't mean I didn't like the book.

[Elgin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading these stories. All were rather somber and all dealing with someone working through a loss of some kind. I will not go into further specifics, but I enjoyed this theme and thought Perlman studied it from many creative and diverse perspectives. Finally, I enjoyed the writing style; writing as art comes across much better in a well written short story than it does in a novel.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book through a few times. It's beautiful, moving, serious, sad, and real. It just feels like real life, the characters are so believe-able.

My favorite author.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Australian books flush in the opposite direction.
Probably why this was better upon second reading.
I give "A Tale in Two Cities" four koalas!

[Mengting · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has a very dreamy and romantic touch to each of the stories that is written inside the book. Simple, moving stories.

[Shannon Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were hauntingly lovely.

[Kenneth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13659943

[Alison Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories feel unfinished, as if the author didn't work out what they were about (or I didn't, at least). But they all dive deep into the emotion underlying ordinary life.