Twenty Grand

by Rebecca Curtis

In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well.

In "Hungry Self," a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in "Twenty Grand," a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in "Monsters," one family's paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in "The Witches," an innocent swim on prom night proves more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. With elegant prose and a wicked sense of humor, these stories reveal Curtis's provocative and uncompromising view of life, one that makes her writing so poignant and irresistible.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Collections, Literature, Short Story Collection

272 pages, ebook

First published July 1, 2007

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda hard to talk about this one, it’s all very blah blah blah, not much happening. A kid gets a summer job. Somebody drowns. But here’s how to tell if you’d like Rebecca Curtis – do you like American indie movies? If so, these are short stories written with you in mind.

These are the movies this book is most like

THE PUFFY CHAIR



LITTLE BIRDS



DRINKING BUDDIES



PIECES OF APRIL



YOUR SISTER’S SISTER



PLEASE GIVE



WENDY AND LUCY



I liked it but not so that I woke up at three am screaming out my joy of having read it, much to the annoyance of my neighbors. I didn’t race round my office giving out free copies. I haven’t taken out full page ads in the London Times at my own expense. When I finished it I thought ok that was okay. Kind of like those indie movies I like a lot but would never bother to recommend to anyone.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a great story(Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of S**t) in a recent New Yorker by this author and now will read her debut collection from 2007. She goes back further than I thought ... I can see already that I've read one of these("The Alpine Slide") in the New Yorker years ago. Great story ... I'll probably remember a couple of others as I go along.

1 - "Hungry Self" - All three of the author's stories that I've read so far focus on the trying life of a young woman/girl. At the heart of the "problem" is the girl's f-ed up family. That'd be Mom and Dad for the uninitiated. How well I can identify. Philip Larkin summed it up pretty well. The poem is "This Be the Verse" ...

2 - Summer, with Twins - Another summer job story, with the emphasis on confusion, money, emotional isolation. The absence of any family references speaks volumes.

3 - 6 ... To the Interstate(a dream of confusion and frustration) ... The Alpine Slide(read before, the summer job thing) ... The Near-Son(more dream-prose, with an ending like The Lottery) ... Big Bear, California(I want to be alone) ... The author maintains her gloomy psychic background in all these stories. The central theme is the emotionally difficult life of particular young women. Seems like depression to me. Very well written - IMHO.

7-8 - Monsters and Knick, Knack, Paddywhack - Numbers 7 and 8 continue in the mode of dreamlike, sketchy non-narrative. It's pretty well done, but unsettling and unenlightening. Definitely not for all tastes. Mood pieces ...

9 - The title story is in a more conventional mode and visits a them mentioned in a blurb: the tension in a mother-daughter relationship. The mom is kind of a youthful, clueless failure at life and the daughter(she's still just a little girl) kind of gets it, but wants to remain loyal. Familial love ... we don't get to choose our parents and survive the best we can as long as we're at their mercy.

10 - The Wolf at the Door - pretty much a re-run of monsters. Dreary, frustrating dream stuff.

11 - Solicitation - Another cryptic mystery "story." The "meaning" is almost beside the point. The psychic "feel " is everything.

11 - The Witches - another unpleasant tale of toxic detachment and youthful cluelessness. As usual, the parents are barely "present." Is this story overly calculated? What's the effect?

12 - The Sno-Cone Cart - and one more mood piece. It's as effectively rendered as all the others and the feeling invoked in the reader is just as ephemeral. More evidence of bad parenting. "The girl" seems zoned-out, not paying attention a lot of the time(in all the stories)

So ... a hard-to-rate book. The author has a gift for the bleak(read "Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of S..t" in that recent New Yorker) and one wonders about where it all comes from. Seems to me that her young life experience(s) must be the source of the negative psychic energy. Otherwise, why write these stories, if not to make the sadness and detachment real.

- A first = the superfluous and semi-weird New Hampshire tourist stuff at the end. WTF?

The author has a featured story in the new New Yorker "Fiction" issue. 7-2021 ...

- a recent thought(10-30-2022)... if you like/love Alice Munro you may well like/love this one.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's the deal, people. These are stories that know how to sound like stories, but offer much, much less than they think they're delivering, which, basically, is a merely brand of faux-literary tourism. First person narrators, floating around some fastidiously evoked scenery, while eschewing nearly all interiority. Narrators that expect that we "get it" from a few minimalistic physical descriptions. Well, we do and we don't. The sound that Curtis makes is a kind of not-sound--or, at the very least, a sort of quasi-sound, dependent upon coy revelations and the supposed weight of the things she's left out. Take away some of the O. Henryesque main events in these stories--a valuable coin given to a toll both worker! a rich dad who asks for rent from a poor girl!--and you're left with cool, stylized, and basically unconvincing first person detachment.

P.S. If I sound bitter, and I do, it's b/c I had high expectatins. I'd read many of these stories in magazines/journals, thinking wow, I'm a fan of this. Then, after re-reading them altogether, I felt duped.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really did not enjoy this book of short stories. I am not sure you could even call them stories, more like snippets of dreamlike situations that have no real beginning, no real ending and pure nonsense in between. The few of them that were actually coherent were depressing and usually involved characters being verbally cruel to one another. I tried to understand the POV of the author, Rebecca Curtis, but I think she and I have a different outlook on 'creative writing'. It reminded me of the arguments I used to have with my college writing professor because he thought my writing was a little too 'abstract' and didn't quite grasp what point I was attempting to make. There were a few stories, such as 'The Witches' and 'Summer, with Twins' that were interesting, but nothing I would have liked her to further extrapolate into a novel.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I didn't fully understand all of the short stories, the author's voice was so unique and different than anything I've read in the past. Twenty Grand is disturbing, innovative, and also inspiring. After picking up this book, I started writing again for the first time in quite a while. Something about the stories just got all these ideas flowing through my head, and that's why I gave it five stars. Not many books can affect me the way this one has, and I look forward to Curtis writing more in the future.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Christmas Miracle in The New Yorker and needed more Curtis. (Go read that, it's amazing.) This is a solid collection, a batch of stories that range from social realism (teenaged girls working dubious jobs over summer, etc.) to some kind of fantasy (families menaced by monsters that politely demand one person be given over to them.) The last story, "The Sno Kone Cart," was a real kicker for me.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple language, so much so that you think you're talking to someone in line at the grocery store, yet she hits without being heavy-handed on so many things that people want to gloss over and forget, like the nuances of class differences in America.

Her first story is probably the most literal and representational in the telling. The rest of the stories, however, take a cue from Rebecca Brown's and Zsuzsi Gartner's work: they don't seek to be representational, and the whimsical stories have something of fairy tale gone wrong in them in a gritty, too-adult way. The narrative is abstract and left without grounding or resolution. For me, the effect is addictive; for others, this might be infuriating since the story is told more through omissions than directness.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curtis's stories are fierce, scary, funny, and artful. Most collections are forgiveably uneven; almost every story in this Twenty Grand is truly strong. "Hungry Self" is extraordinary, and Curtis's dreamlike, "illogical" stories work as well as her naturalistic ones. Wow.

[Chance Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried reading this collection of short stories about 2.5 years ago. I didn't realize I'd reviewed the stories I read. I concluded my original review, "these stories just aren't for me at this time."

They must be for me at this time, because I greatly enjoyed (most of) what I read. However, there a lot of stories here. Maybe too many, as some of the more esoteric ones are quite weak. The back of the book features an endorsement from George Saunders, and in Curtis's weirder stories, it feels like she's going for the George Saunders way of creating a world that runs at a tangent from our own, but she doesn't quite nail it. And sometimes, like with the story "Monsters" in which monsters come to eat one member of a family, she goes off the rails entirely.

Perhaps I'm biased, but Curtis's best stories are those set in the very real, but no less weird, world of rural New Hampshire. "Hungry Self," "Summer, with Twins," "The Alpine Slide," "Twenty Grand," and "The Witches" are all wonderful stories about identity, loss, and longing.

I think "Twenty Grand," the title story, is the strongest in the bunch. The collection is subtitled "and other tales of Love and Money," and Twenty Grand has both, and it's about losing both. And it's not about only romantic love, but familial, and struggling when both love and money are in short supply. This story is heartbreaking, and a couple of moments made my breath catch in my throat, including the devastating ending.

Good quotes:

"You're too quiet," he said. "The world won't come to you. You can wait as long as you want. It won't come to you. You can wait as long as you want. And then it will be gone."

Their enthusiasm made me angry, because it seemed false, but then I became included in it and realized it was genuine.

Then he squeezed my shoulder hard and said that the twins had started life on third base and no one would ever look at me twice, the way people looked at them. Maybe if there were two of me, I said. I was kidding, but I guess he didn't realize that, because he said, No, they still wouldn't.

"She lives in a trailer, she doesn't have a washer and dryer, and she's not going to sue because she's from New Hampshire. She's a local. [...] Locals don't sue," he said. "It's those bastards from Massachusetts that sue."

**

Original review from 14 January 2014: I set myself up for disappointment with this one. Or, the incredible way in which Rebecca Curtis has grown as a writer in the last five years set me up for disappointment.

I read Curtis's "The Christmas Miracle" in the New Yorker (Dec. 23, 2013) and what a firecracker of a story that is. (A woman with Lyme disease battles the sugar-craving bacteria in her brain while spending Christmas Eve with her sister, her pedophile uncle, and a bunch of cats who keep getting devoured by coyotes in the family's backyard.) Although there was nothing mystical about the story, there was an element of supernatural weirdness to it all. The three stories I read in Twenty Grand ("Hungry Self", "Summer, with Twins," and "To the Interstate") were much more mundane than "The Christmas Miracle." "Hungry Self" was a wonderful, devastating story of emotional disconnectedness, but these stories just aren't for me at this time.

[Lori Baxter Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several years ago, one of Curtis’s stories from this collection, “The Alpine Slide,” appeared in _The New Yorker_, and I never forgot it. On the surface, it is a poignant tale about a teenage girl’s first summer job at a small amusement park in New Hampshire, but at its heart is a coming-off-age story about boundaries and trust in relationships. Most of Curtis’s work is deceptively simple, and her genius lies in her ability to capture a greater understanding of human nature through the mundane.

She is at her best when she places flawed characters in dire predicaments of their own design (as in the titular story) or when her characters face obstacles but lack the tools they need to overcome them (as with “Summer, with the Twins”), but some of her attempts at fables and reconstructing familiar fairy tales are reminiscent of college-level creative writing exercises. But for all the angst and odd stylistic choices, Curtis is a fresh and distinctive voice in literature with moments of brilliance, and I even see shades of the mighty Lorrie Moore in her work at times. David Foster Wallace once referred to Denis Johnson’s _Angels_ as “bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice,” and I think the simile often applies to Curtis’s writing as well. I look forward to her next collection.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is interesting about this collection is the way that Curtis uses the techniques of Realism to attack Realism. Many of these stories are clearly anti-stories. Some use dream logic; not dreams, but the non-sensical and unrealistic logic and plotting that dreams exhibit. Others seem an attempt to write the worst story possible, similar to certain SNL skits where the delivery is dead serious but the audience knows it's all knobbery because it's a comedy show. It's as if she saying "want to see how inane Realism can be?" Another curious technique is that nearly all of her female narrators describe themselves as not being very bright, an opinion a reader could agree with based on some of their choices, but this is clearly meant to be taken ironically. Awareness of consequences is also conspicuously absent in these stories, which align them with the the too hip for that crowd. Curtis studied with George Saunders and Diane Williams and those influences are apparent in these stories, many of which also bear the traces of the experiments in form (try this, now try that, make them do x, then, y, etc.) and I'll be curious to see what she does differently with her talent in the future.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in two days--and that's rare for me these days--but it's a fantastic collection. Her narrators are baffled and sometimes a little mean, but that tone fits these stories of small town (New Hampshire) life so well. Curtis is funny but there's something heartbroken behind all of it--I was hugely impressed. Read the first page, and you'll want to stay in this world.

[Marissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was awful from beginning to end. The short stories (if you can even call them stories) had little to no depth and left me scratching my head wondering wtf I just read.

[RH Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curtis is wildly talented and her New Yorker story The Christmas Miracle made me seek out this collection. These stories feel true but unremittingly bleak, with characters' fates either flatlining or going downhill. I'm on an unfortunate streak of reading books about people unhappily trapped in their circumstances, a trend that is simply not doing me any good right now. Some of the depictions of self-destructiveness, economic disadvantage and loneliness are unforgettable. I think this writing was necessary to get to inspired lunacy of The Christmas Miracle, and I can't wait to read what's next.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ultimately I think best enjoyed in slightly smaller, spaced-apart doses, Rebecca Curtis is nonetheless supremely fun and funny to follow on the page.

The stories I liked best here were: “Summer, with Twins,” “Big Bear, California,” “The Sno-Kone Cart,” and “The Witches.”

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy Rebecca Curtis’ painful writing style, having first found her short stories in The New Yorker.
Her characters have such a vivid, poignant way of pointing out other people’s bullshit that can be funny, angry, and sad all at the same time. I can relate.

She seems to specialize in dysfunctional nuclear family dynamics, and appears to be keenly aware of how it affects people in their adulthood.

Often sullen and resentful but always insightful, Curtis seems to relish loading nearly outlandish economic and family struggles onto her protagonists in a way that makes me think they must be somewhat cathartic and semi autobiographical. But many of her “tales of love and money” seem to inhabit a unique space that deals with some serious subject matter in almost farcical, fantastic terms, mixing the mundane with the absurd that I find absorbing. Curtis is able to make even the most absurdly fallible and self defeating characters understandable and even relatable in their humanity. I think that Curtis really knows what it’s like to be the black sheep of the family, and how things got that way for the black sheep and the family around them.

And so she has either one hell of an imagination or is really brave. I’m a huge admirer of her writing and became an instant fan, so I’m inclined to think that it’s both.

[Erica Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories are somewhat uneven, and have jarringly different styles (a blurb from George Saunders on the back serves as a reminder that some of Curtis' writing -- maybe her earlier attempts??-- echoes his a bit too much)

That being said, several stories (i loved Twenty Grand and Alpine Slide) are amazing.

[Stephanie Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

How I love this book. The title story is one of my favorites -- so beautifully conveys the child-protagonist's love/hate relationship with her mother. And I always appreciate it when younger characters are treated with dignity. Also a big fan of the more fantastical pieces in the collection.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 100th book I've rated this year! It was very good, too.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://muumuuhouse.com/rc.fiction2.html

[Stella Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis is a collection of short stories revolving around love, money, relationships, family, and various jobs. Curtis explores societal pressure on girls, ranging in age from young teens to older adults, combining difficulties with relationships, money, and overall success in a collection of stories. Using real-life examples from a wide range of experiences, from first jobs to a disastrous night after prom, to getting an abortion, there is something in this story that most people can relate to.
I enjoyed most of the stories, particularly “Summer with Twins,” “Twenty Grand,” and “Big Bear California. Each of these stories has vastly different plots and perspectives, but all of them center around women's experiences in the world dealing with societal influence and pressure as they try to live their lives. “Summer with Twins,” is about a girl who spends a summer living with twins and they all work as waitresses at a local restaurant. As the girl struggles to make money to go back to school in the fall, she is faced with complex issues for a young teen, ranging from different ways to make money, and the letdown she experiences from her friends, all while learning and exploring the life of an older waitress who also works at the restaurant. “Thousand dollars, I thought, thousand dollars. But it didn’t work. I didn’t want to go on his boat.`` (Curtis 42).
Twenty Grand is about a young mom with 2 children whose husband works as a military guard and is rarely home. The story explores the mom struggling with her 2 children without her husband, and centers on a night when she loses a coin worth $20,000. I liked this story because while it was pretty easy to understand, I enjoyed the deeper meaning it displayed. Showing the difficulties of a wife living alone with 2 young kids, the struggle of having a nosy mother-in-law, and touching on struggling with appropriately spending money. “My mother asked for money. He gave her a ten. She asked for a twenty. He told her a ten was all he had, save for the five he’d set aside for himself. She said we needed groceries.” (167).
“Big Bear California” focuses on a young girl living in a dorm, and her struggles after a blind date with a Law student. I enjoyed this story specifically because it portrayed a lot of realistic thoughts and the thought process of a young girl after going on a date, and then the aftermath of what followed. “He asked if he could kiss me. I said no. I might have said that I was sorry or did not know him well enough. I should explain that I had known when he’d arrived and stepped out of his truck and put his arms around me that I would never want to make love to him or for him to make love to me or for us to have any sort of physical intimacy at all.” (111).
Overall I did enjoy this collection, I liked the realistic stories that I was able to connect to on some level. The themes that connected all of the stories, despite varying greatly, tied the whole collection together nicely.

[Sundae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate short stories and I never read them. But I did read these. As an overall experience, I'd give this book 3 stars, but some of the short stories are more like 4 or 5, so I'll be generous with 4 stars.
I hate short stories because there are only two possible ways to write one. 1. the protagonist's life is awful, something happens to make them think it might get better, but it doesn't and we are left knowing things will go on pretty much the same; or 2. the protagonist's life is awful, stuff happens, and at the end it's worse. Think about it. All short stories are like this.
In 2013, the New Yorker posted a short story by Rebecca Curtis, "A Christmas Miracle," that I not only liked, I loved and re-read often. I usually skip the short stories in the New Yorker (see reasons above) and will read all the movie listings in NYC, a place I've been for 5 days total in my whole 53 years before I will read the short stories, but this one's first line ("Cats were dying.") horrified and intrigued me (I love cats) and I kept going. It didn't end like the usual short story -- a Christmas miracle! This one had a tiny shred of hope at the end.
Recently, I sent my sister and her boyfriend a link to the story and I had to re-read it again before I did, and then I decided to look up the author, Rebecca Curtis. She has published stories in magazines, but this is her only book, which was published in 2007 and doesn't include "A Christmas Miracle."
These stories were not as good (see reasons above). No miracles occurred. If you like short stories of the weird and off-kilter and semi-reliable narrator variety (kinda like Shirley Jackson's, which I have read because I love Shirley Jackson and would read her to-do lists if I could) you will like these. If you hate short stories, you can probably skip these, but read this instead: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
TW: Cats do die. But it's a good read anyway.

[derek allard · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some awesome stories in here ... and there are some that miss the mark for me. "Summer, with Twins", "The Alpine Slide" and "The Sno-Cone Kart" are all excellent and I challenge you to find a better ending to a story than the closing lines of "The Alpine Slide". Read it and said "Wow" out loud. Other stories, particularly the supernatural ones, I struggled getting into and some of the others felt a bit thin. She is a great writer (if you've never read "The Toast" do yourself a favor and read it) but this collection was a bit up and down for me. Worth reading, but uneven.

[Ayla · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Curtis’s story A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE from a December 2013 issue of The New Yorker so I thought I’d give this a read. Being from New England, I love her tactile descriptions of the seasons and sensations. But, there are several stories that read like fever dreams, and I’m not a fan of the casual use of the R word and a story about a “crack-head.” One could argue that 2005 was a different time but I don’t think it was that different.

[Kylie Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I did not love every story in this collection. I liked all of them. Like other readers said, the harder to swallow have a detached, snarky tone, but I think that was executed brilliantly in a few of the stories, especially "Near-Son."

My favorites, were "Near- Son," "The Alpine Slide," and "The Witches." All capture some of the emotions of being a young woman in a way I have never experienced before.

[Helena · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are only 3 very good stories in this collection: "Twenty Grand," "The Alpine Slide," and "Big Bear, California." A few others are amusing, but forgettable.

I got this collection because I'd fallen in love with two later (2014) Curtis stories, "The Toast" and "The Pink House," published in Harper's and The New Yorker respectively. I recommend those. They're miles ahead of these earlier stories.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it so much that I bought it. I adore her voice. I would read a grocery list if she wrote it.

But after she had listened to the tale of my dream--one in which I lived alone, performed a boring job, and led a desolate life--she said, "Your dreams are not interesting. In other circumstances, they might be, but here we deal every day with matters of life and death." I knew she was right. I let her go to bed. I sat in the living room by myself.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written stories, a few of them I greatly enjoyed for the scenes and the insights, such as the title story, the last story (about sisters and the love for a niece), and the story of the New Hampshire mountain slide. A few others were a bit too oddly fantastic (e.g., like Aimee Bender rather than Alice Munro) for me to enjoy, but all artfully done.

[Hanneke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The two stars are in comparison to Curtis' story Hansa, Gretyl and Piece of Sh*t. That story just felt so much richer than the stories in this collection. Just enough fairytale, but not too much. A lot of darkness, but also love. And then the engagement with the landscape, the non human etc. No such density in this collection unfortunately!

[Chaitra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I was missing something. Many of the stories were too short to be stories. Or let me put it this way - really short stories can tell a tale, make a difference. But these were not those stories. These felt like a day in the life of whomever the story was about, only the day was of a truly boring sort. Lots of words, not much memorable.