Luck: Stories

by Ed Meek

A young bartender in Boston’s North End finds himself complicit in the breakdown of his roommate’s relationship with a girlfriend; a married, middle-aged professor of composition abjectly crumbles under the stress of his affair with a beautiful student. In his debut fiction collection, poet Ed Meek vividly reimagines a gritty, freewheeling 1970s New England whose cynical, impulsive inhabitants—torn between the longing for human connection and the fear of domesticity—negotiate the blurry boundaries of personal responsibility. With these deceptively mundane accounts of ordinary lives in transition, Meek paints a humane, subtle portrait of ordinary people grasping at explanations for the things they do.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2017

Reviews

[P.K. Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meek’s concise, elegant prose zooms in on the lives of Bostonians both at home and farther afield, and is set mainly in the 1970s, with a few stories set in more contemporary times. But the clear, easy-to-read style belies the thorny issues raised by the narratives that explore the fragility of modern relationships, and the drudgery and precariousness of existence, particularly, though not exclusively, in the turn-of-the-century urban landscape.

[Michael Onofrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are written in a clear, straightforward manner, but the characters that inhabit the stories aren’t straightforward. There are glitches, many of which occur midst relationships. So in effect there’s this duality that haunts this intriguing collection of stories by Ed Meek. Everything seems so simple and easy on the surface because of the style of writing, but things are bubbling and it’s the characters—troubles, complications, quirks, and so forth. Thus there is tension, sometimes mild and sometimes intense.

And it wasn’t just the contrast between writing style and characters that played with duality, for in many of the pieces there was an easygoing casualness in the narrative voice, high or low registers regardless, and yet the subject matter and themes were quite serious. “Getting in Trouble,” for example, had me laughing through the entire piece, but below the surface, organically, there was this topic/theme that had to do with getting old (an elderly man) and what that might mean. Kind of like Huckleberry Finn and Jim floating down the Mississippi on a raft—lots of humor and lots of easygoing language, but . . .

In many of the stories, particularly in Part I of the collection, I caught myself thinking about how relationships can, and do, take place anywhere. This, in a sense, seems so obvious, and yet I somehow needed a reminder, perhaps because I tend to isolate relationships and surround them with romantic notions. Some of the characters do this too—romantic notions—hello reality. Or maybe it was just that I had never thought about how relationships can begin and proceed and end anywhere even though I’ve had such experiences myself. But isn’t that one aspect of good storytelling—reminding us of ourselves and reminding us of what’s obvious but is somehow overlooked? In one story, for example, there’s a relationship on an apple farm at harvest time (how nice, but . . .), while in another story there’s a relationship during the fall of Iran, which happens to be the title of the story: “The Fall of Iran.” And so these stories are interesting not only for the dynamic human interaction of relationships but also for what surrounds them: apples and revolution, for example.

Didactic speech is absent in this collection and so is melodrama. The reader isn’t going to get pat morality nor a lecture, and neither is there any begging for tears. The characters and their activities are put forth clearly—and that’s it. Characters get themselves into trouble or out of trouble, or both. There is fantasy and exaggeration at times, but in both cases it’s part of style and construction, which might even suggest parody. “Out West” is an example of this.

I enjoyed reading these stories—just to kick back and enjoy good storyteller. Themes and ideas and issues were an added attraction that came naturally. They weren’t forced.

[Alicia Zuto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if the author didn't speak of common grounds(he's a local author that I wasn't aware of until luck had me pick up this book;)) I would have been just as excited about my new discovery. His stories are versatile and leave so much to the imagination in terms of the reader, such as myself, who is left to wonder how much of these stories are true and how much are just pure genius. Ed Meeks insight on the human behavior is astounding right down to each calculated thought. I was left to ponder on how many stories were probably derived from one articulated thought. He tells many of them from different perspectives such as a male narrator, female narrator... I am grateful for my new discovery. The author makes me want to pick up a pen and start writing stories myself but that's impossible when I can't put the book down;)