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People #1
Good People
“Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.” — Los Angeles Times
“Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” — JESS WALTER , author of Beautiful Ruins
“Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” — DAN CHAON , author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People . In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.
Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River , and the story collection Asunder . He lives in Brooklyn.
“Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” — JESS WALTER , author of Beautiful Ruins
“Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” — DAN CHAON , author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People . In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.
Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River , and the story collection Asunder . He lives in Brooklyn.
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 12, 2016
About the author
Robert Lopez
249 books23 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 12, 2015
Good People is an incredible whirlwind confrontational challenge against the blanket statement of labeling the masses, seemingly average individuals, or downright scumbags as being ‘good people.’ Robert Lopez implores us to consider exactly what it means when we pay someone this compliment.
The twenty stories in Good People are consistently delivered in a conversational yet drunken-like stream of consciousness. It’s a voice that talks in circles yet steadily moves forward. We know from the start that Lopez is going to deliver an honest and gritty perspective of the human condition, that he won’t shy away from the unpopular and impolite thoughts and feeling we all have on occasion, yet cloaked in all this provocative honesty will be the unreliability of the narrators. The eponymous ‘good people’ aren’t the narrators in the stories (though they mostly think they are), but rather a mythical group of people whose facets can’t quite be defined. Is being a ‘good person’ an attribute of personality or a marker of action? If the former, how does mental illness and the instability of addiction complicate the matter? Is being a good person contingent upon pristine mental health and a loving, supportive upbringing? And if the latter, is the ultimate course of action and its consequences the bottom line to being a good or bad person? What role does intention play here, and how should we account for the harboring of malicious ‘bad person’ thoughts yet still choosing to enact beneficial, or at least non-harmful, deeds?
And underneath all these questions that the stories in Good People evoke, Lopez deftly forces us to consider why we universally and automatically assume that we, ourselves, are good people.
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The twenty stories in Good People are consistently delivered in a conversational yet drunken-like stream of consciousness. It’s a voice that talks in circles yet steadily moves forward. We know from the start that Lopez is going to deliver an honest and gritty perspective of the human condition, that he won’t shy away from the unpopular and impolite thoughts and feeling we all have on occasion, yet cloaked in all this provocative honesty will be the unreliability of the narrators. The eponymous ‘good people’ aren’t the narrators in the stories (though they mostly think they are), but rather a mythical group of people whose facets can’t quite be defined. Is being a ‘good person’ an attribute of personality or a marker of action? If the former, how does mental illness and the instability of addiction complicate the matter? Is being a good person contingent upon pristine mental health and a loving, supportive upbringing? And if the latter, is the ultimate course of action and its consequences the bottom line to being a good or bad person? What role does intention play here, and how should we account for the harboring of malicious ‘bad person’ thoughts yet still choosing to enact beneficial, or at least non-harmful, deeds?
And underneath all these questions that the stories in Good People evoke, Lopez deftly forces us to consider why we universally and automatically assume that we, ourselves, are good people.
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
January 8, 2016
I liked the way the inner lives of Lopez's characters are evoked in this collection of short works previously published in small press publications. His characters generally have disjointed inner narratives and limited self awareness. As I think about it, so do I, and so, probably, do you. The mental shorthand we employ to connect our thoughts and feelings within our inner narratives is a substrate we're largely unaware of. Lopez's characters' inner lives all seem essentially inchoate, cemented together by what they perceive as their unitary identities. While his characters mostly consist of outsiders that wouldn't fit most people's ideas of what "Good People" are, these characters all feel that they are inherently good people. The collection seems unified in tone, with the exception of the last piece, "How to Direct a Major Motion Picture, " which I found to be quite funny. Good People was a short, fun read that left a lasting impression on this reader.
Want to Read
May 25, 2016I'm a huge, forever fan of Robert Lopez. Can't wait to read this.
August 14, 2015
"Every good man has something wrong with him, something fundamentally unwholesome and feeble."
The genius of Robert Lopez is on full display in this hilarious, twisted, and brilliant collection. Fans of Beckett, Carver, Etgar Keret will love this, but Lopez's voice is refreshing and dark and unlike anyone's. These stories will rope you in and make you a diehard fan -- if you aren't one already, what you waiting for?
The genius of Robert Lopez is on full display in this hilarious, twisted, and brilliant collection. Fans of Beckett, Carver, Etgar Keret will love this, but Lopez's voice is refreshing and dark and unlike anyone's. These stories will rope you in and make you a diehard fan -- if you aren't one already, what you waiting for?
October 23, 2016
The multi-page paragraphs were tough for me, but Lopez's prose can be irresistible. "Goodnight Maybe Forever" starts:
The narrators babble on, betraying themselves over and over. Grim, and often very funny.
Today I will hang myself in the backyard. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of this. Every day I do something and this is what I have scheduled for today. Yesterday I ate a peach. I hadn't had a peach in years, I don't think, since I was a child.
The narrators babble on, betraying themselves over and over. Grim, and often very funny.
April 17, 2015
The incantatory rhythm of Robert Lopez in these stories, like any worthwhile mantra, blends the hard lines of living to create a uniformity, a new language, like tuning into a frequency modulation that emanates from all the inner rooms of the buildings and homes you walk by everyday, from the strangers on the streets who brush your shoulder along a crowded commute and fills your mind with straight and distilled lives from the cacophony. You are hearing into people who are not "right" as society would hardly deem to accept them but maybe they are more pervasive than we want to believe. And these worlds are believable because the language is simultaneously foreign and familiar – which made rise in me my own dread, my own laughter, and my own yearning for a knowledge that these Good People are taking these steps amongst us, delivering their lives above the banal and safe common daily weirdness. Sure, that'd be challenging to live in that world. But maybe we already are living there. At least with Robert's stories I get to play around, to be safely haunted and having a gas of a time in the process... until I go walk in the streets and wonder if I am walking among the Good People.
December 20, 2015
Good People is a collection of 20 short stories by Robert Lopez, a gifted writer from Brooklyn, NY. Mostly written as first person narratives, these are very human voices and they don't belong to people that are simply "good". Some are disturbed, some are funny, and some are meandering or fragmented.
Lopez says, “I think of writing, particularly when it comes to first person, as like an acting performance, where you improvise, try different things, assume roles that aren’t you. This is one of the great things about writing…I never set out to try something particular when I write. I try to let it happen.” This goal is very evident in these stories. Most do not have a firm sense of place or plot but listening to these voices still has a powerful impact.
Lopez says, “I think of writing, particularly when it comes to first person, as like an acting performance, where you improvise, try different things, assume roles that aren’t you. This is one of the great things about writing…I never set out to try something particular when I write. I try to let it happen.” This goal is very evident in these stories. Most do not have a firm sense of place or plot but listening to these voices still has a powerful impact.
May 20, 2016
Quick thoughts: Overall, this book was alright and had some nice turns of phrase, but too many stories echoed the ones that had come before them, both thematically and stylistically. This collection seemed more like several attempts to get one story or voice right, rather than a fully formed and cohesive grouping of stories. Good for a one-off read, but laborious to get through the entire set.
September 4, 2015
short stories of the inner, and day to day lives of regular folk. that is, us, with no money, 'funny' friends, even 'funnier' family, dreams of endings, when we get to it.
March 26, 2018
An amazing book of short stories. Lopez has a unique style and brilliant content.
October 17, 2018
Bad book, bad author. pretentious person. High key gross.
January 25, 2016
I didn't love this book. Robert Lopez has a distinct style and voice in his writing. I enjoy books by men, especially Latinos, that deconstruct toxic masculinity and put a lens on the terrible way men think about women or the terrible things men to do women and to each other. I liked how no one in this book could conceivably be called “good.” The first story “Family of Man on Isle of Wight” was my favorite. I loved the opening sentence, “let me understand something to you,” and how the whole story is essentially one very long sentence. Lopez’ prose has a lot of energy,
June 17, 2016
A collection of short stories all told in a first-person inner monologue of someone who has lost his marbles. It's fascinating at first, and well written, but by the end it just seems the same thing over and over again. Each story is mercifully short. Maybe best not to read this in one go but keep it around bedside for twenty days.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews