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Officer Friendly: and Other Stories
The stories in this acclaimed debut all take place in the state of Maine—which quickly comes to stand for the state we’re all in when we face the moments that change our lives forever. Two roughneck hockey players are kicked off the team and forced to join the drama club. A young bartender at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Can a father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat?
With humor, a piercing eye, and a sense that danger often lies just around the corner, Robinson gives us a variety of vivid characters, wealthy and poor, delinquent and romantic, while illuminating the mythic, universal implications of so-called ordinary life. These stories are at once classic and modern; taken together, they bring the good news that an important, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.
With humor, a piercing eye, and a sense that danger often lies just around the corner, Robinson gives us a variety of vivid characters, wealthy and poor, delinquent and romantic, while illuminating the mythic, universal implications of so-called ordinary life. These stories are at once classic and modern; taken together, they bring the good news that an important, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 17, 2011
A terrific set of stories set in the fictional town of Point Allison, Maine, that is a recurring "character" through all the pieces. It is the "remote, depressed part of Maine that doesn't get much traffic" [from "The Diver"]; where "everyone knows everyone" [from "The Finches"]; and "no one likes the people who come here in the summer [from "Seeing the World"].
Robinson populates this world with fascinating characters: the diver who has nothing but disdain for the weekend yachtsman who is helpless when a rope gets caught in his propeller; the foolish but indefatigable truck-driving father who has a plan to get rich by stealing the painting he's been asked to transport from the Metropolitan Museum; and the feisty teenager, who won't listen to her high school play director because she wants to take the well-known orphan from Oliver Twist and spice him up with some sex in their production of Oliver!
Robinson also captures arresting visual images: a father who lies on seaweed and rocks as he duck hunts, with his body and rifle forming a perfect line to the horizon; the fogs that sets in on a backyard boxing ring as the boxer waits for the big fight that will end his short-lived taste of local fame; the ne-er do well who saves a bunch of finches from being snake food and then releases them on a crowded bridge.("One after the next they dropped in a brief free fall from the truck, caught the updraft, and vanished through the suspension cables.")
But in this insular world that is not very welcoming and not easily understandable to outsiders, the problems are familiar - absent or unreliable fathers, relationships that don't click, lives that don't measure up to each person's hopes and expectations for themselves.
The 11 stories in the collection are:
1. The Diver - 21 pp - A Portland restaurant owner, Peter, gets stranded on his boat when a rope gets tangled in the propeller. He swims to Point Allison to enlist the support of a diver. The diver, in a condescending and patronizing fashion (he keeps calling Peter "friend"), makes Peter feel stupid for everything he says and does. Peter himself fears he must seem like a "jack$**" yachtsman." After the diver disentangles the rope, Peter's wife, Margaret, invites the diver for a dinner of mussels with them and their infant daughter on the boat. As the diver keeps teasing and putting Peter down, and making crass comments about Margaret when she's below deck, it's unclear just how menacing he is going to be.
2. Officer Friendly - 10 pp - Two high school hockey players are causing trouble, sending bottle rockets over traffic. An officer arrives on the scene and chases them and catches one of them. The caught boy knows the policeman because he was the one who gave anti-drug lectures at his elementary school as "Officer Friendly." The cop also knows the boy because his son is on the hockey team. When the friend who escaped returns, disguised as a bum, to distract the cop and free his friend from the police car, the cop gives chase again, and this time he experiences what may be the start of a heart attack. As he struggles on the ground, the boys have to decide whether to help him get his nitroglycerin tablet or escape with their freedom.
3. The Edge of The Forest and the Edge of The Ocean - 26 pp - A man who has come back to his hometown to teach at the junior high begins an affair with a fellow teacher whom he's had a crush on since their high school days together. Back then, he never had the nerve to connect with her. Even though she's married to a cop now, the onset of their affair has him in a blissful state until he drives to work and discovers his best friend in high school on a bridge. In their school days, that friend had aggressively dared him to hang as long as he could off a catwalk on the same bridge. Since then he's lost touch with the friend, and the friend has fallen on hard times. Now he has to wonder if the friend is there to commit suicide.
4. The Toast - 16 pp - The one departure from realistic story-telling, as Robinson has fun with a slightly surreal premise. An old man dying of cancer holds a lavish party, and a young man who's just visiting town to meet his mother's new second husband, is invited along. At the party, a sexy bartender gives the man a gun and her imposing football-lineman sized brother asks him to kill the older gentleman and put him out of misery before he has to undergo the long, painful ordeal of dying from pancreatic cancer - a proposal his mother, after warning him about how wild and exaggerated the people from Point Allison talk, seems to fully endorse.
5. Ride - 22 pp - A teenaged boy who has only seen his father about twice a year since he moved out on him and his mother six years ago takes a trip with his father, now a freight truck driver, on his 16th birthday. The son thinks it'll be a great adventure, but his father has other plans. The only item in his cargo compartment is a painting they pick up from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are supposed to deliver to someplace (a private collector?) in the upstate city of Plattsburgh. But en route the father explains he has another one of his cockamamie get-rich-quick schemes - a fake "hijacking" that will yield him a share of the profits when the painting is sold to an illicit buyer. As the father bumbles through his inept plans to become a criminal, it's clear the boy has to act like a father to the man.
6. Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis - 20 pp - A pregnant medical student, Eleanor, and her boyfriend, Bill, a food writer, travel back to his hometown of Cuxabexis, an island off the coast of Maine. While staying with Bill's aunt, Eleanor decides to reveal that she's pregnant - news that later gets blared over the loud speaker at a pep rally for the school's basketball team. (The title, "Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis," is the school fight song.) At the rally, Eleanor also learns Bill was a former star for the team. While connecting with Bill's family, Eleanor daydreams what her future as a mother will hold. There's an interesting undercurrent here about physicality. Eleanor had to teach Bill to be a more interesting lover than a simple piston, but she also has a taste for foreplay that resembles wrestling. She is uncomfortable with cutting open conscious pigs in her surgical training classes, but on the island people have an earthiness that gives them a different relationship with animals. After serving a rabbit dish, Bill's aunt openly admits she likes watching rabbits mate and encourages Eleanor to visit the farm where they're raised. When Eleanor does, the farmer is killing and skinning the rabbits, and Eleanor helps him tie one down before he slaughters it. Meanwhile, Bill is on the court, trying to prove to his nephew, the latest star of the basketball team, that he still has some game.
7. Fighting at Night - 14 pp - An amateur fighter decides to take on an experienced boxer. The story is all about his preparation. His trainer is a woman he shares a house with, along with her boyfriend. To train, he takes on everyone in town willing to spar with him in a makeshift ring they've built in their backyard. He beats all the men in town, including the owner of the hardware store and a few lobstermen. The story takes us right up to the start of the big fight - and details his chance to feel like a champion among all the men in his town. We don't get to see the actual big fight, although the outcome of that seems fairly obvious.
8. Eiders - 14 pp - A father who left his family tries to reconnect with his son while duck hunting. The son expresses his anger by refusing to aim at the birds. Upset that his son isn't honest about his deliberate refusal to hit any targets, the father struggles to articulate why he left but all he can really do is take down more birds, one after another.
9. Seeing the World - 22 pp - 17-year-old Sam becomes an unlikely friend of 35-year-old Johan, when the older man takes a job at the Portland movie theater where Sam works. Sam is an aspiring moviemaker and always has a video camera with him, shooting the daily events of his life and hoping he'll be able to use the footage for his first movie. After reading an article, Johan convinces Sam they can make a killing gathering sea urchins and selling their eggs to the Japanese. Sam's never been anywhere, and he's hungry for experience to fuel his career. He moves down to Point Allison with Johan and they break into an empty summer rental house and begin squatting there. At a fish store, they meet a woman who can actually doing the diving for them. They become an unlikely trio and the woman teaches Sam to dive. Sam develops a crush on her, but wonders if he'll become a third wheel. With his aspirations of becoming a filmmaker intact, Sam has to decide whether he can go through life as a doer or a watcher.
10. Puckheads -42 pp - Two brawling high school hockey players -- Daniel and William, the narrator -- get kicked off the hockey team for causing a near riot at a game. To stay in the private school they attend, they're forced to join the drama club, which is putting on a production of Oliver! There they both develop a crush on a new girl, Christina, a bold young lady and committed actress who's unwilling to take any direction from the drama teacher because she has her own ideas about how the play should be done. ("I think we need to play up the sex.") The two hockey players compete for her attention, and she gets involved with both of them, but it's not clear if she is genuinely interested or trying to inspire better performances out of each of them. When she's making out with William in a school closet, she tells him: "Stop thinking about me as Christina. Think about Nancy [her character], and I'll think about Oliver [his]. It's much easier that way." She does inspire them to take improvisational license, so that their production begins to look like a hockey game.
11. Finches - 17 pp - A terrific character study of a guy who's never been able to hold down jobs or relationships for the long term. He's mistrustful of people and animals, as he notes that compared with human, animals "are equally petty, equally irrational and loathsome." He's working as a delivery man for a veterinarian, but he knows he'll quickly screw up this job as he has every previous one he's had: "if people expect me to disappoint them, I'll do my very best to meet their expectations." He remembers fondly the day he met Dayna, who's recently moved to Point Allison from New York, when he returns her parrot to her loft in a former sardine factory - a very New York, not Maine-like space. Even though the story lets us know he ended up dating Dayna for a year, the piece focuses on that first meeting because, in his view, "The best part had been the beginning, when everything was unknown." And that day may have been his proudest moment: when, with Dayna by his side, he released into the wild a bunch of finches that he rescued from a pet store owner with a snake that would have ended up eating them all.
Robinson populates this world with fascinating characters: the diver who has nothing but disdain for the weekend yachtsman who is helpless when a rope gets caught in his propeller; the foolish but indefatigable truck-driving father who has a plan to get rich by stealing the painting he's been asked to transport from the Metropolitan Museum; and the feisty teenager, who won't listen to her high school play director because she wants to take the well-known orphan from Oliver Twist and spice him up with some sex in their production of Oliver!
Robinson also captures arresting visual images: a father who lies on seaweed and rocks as he duck hunts, with his body and rifle forming a perfect line to the horizon; the fogs that sets in on a backyard boxing ring as the boxer waits for the big fight that will end his short-lived taste of local fame; the ne-er do well who saves a bunch of finches from being snake food and then releases them on a crowded bridge.("One after the next they dropped in a brief free fall from the truck, caught the updraft, and vanished through the suspension cables.")
But in this insular world that is not very welcoming and not easily understandable to outsiders, the problems are familiar - absent or unreliable fathers, relationships that don't click, lives that don't measure up to each person's hopes and expectations for themselves.
The 11 stories in the collection are:
1. The Diver - 21 pp - A Portland restaurant owner, Peter, gets stranded on his boat when a rope gets tangled in the propeller. He swims to Point Allison to enlist the support of a diver. The diver, in a condescending and patronizing fashion (he keeps calling Peter "friend"), makes Peter feel stupid for everything he says and does. Peter himself fears he must seem like a "jack$**" yachtsman." After the diver disentangles the rope, Peter's wife, Margaret, invites the diver for a dinner of mussels with them and their infant daughter on the boat. As the diver keeps teasing and putting Peter down, and making crass comments about Margaret when she's below deck, it's unclear just how menacing he is going to be.
2. Officer Friendly - 10 pp - Two high school hockey players are causing trouble, sending bottle rockets over traffic. An officer arrives on the scene and chases them and catches one of them. The caught boy knows the policeman because he was the one who gave anti-drug lectures at his elementary school as "Officer Friendly." The cop also knows the boy because his son is on the hockey team. When the friend who escaped returns, disguised as a bum, to distract the cop and free his friend from the police car, the cop gives chase again, and this time he experiences what may be the start of a heart attack. As he struggles on the ground, the boys have to decide whether to help him get his nitroglycerin tablet or escape with their freedom.
3. The Edge of The Forest and the Edge of The Ocean - 26 pp - A man who has come back to his hometown to teach at the junior high begins an affair with a fellow teacher whom he's had a crush on since their high school days together. Back then, he never had the nerve to connect with her. Even though she's married to a cop now, the onset of their affair has him in a blissful state until he drives to work and discovers his best friend in high school on a bridge. In their school days, that friend had aggressively dared him to hang as long as he could off a catwalk on the same bridge. Since then he's lost touch with the friend, and the friend has fallen on hard times. Now he has to wonder if the friend is there to commit suicide.
4. The Toast - 16 pp - The one departure from realistic story-telling, as Robinson has fun with a slightly surreal premise. An old man dying of cancer holds a lavish party, and a young man who's just visiting town to meet his mother's new second husband, is invited along. At the party, a sexy bartender gives the man a gun and her imposing football-lineman sized brother asks him to kill the older gentleman and put him out of misery before he has to undergo the long, painful ordeal of dying from pancreatic cancer - a proposal his mother, after warning him about how wild and exaggerated the people from Point Allison talk, seems to fully endorse.
5. Ride - 22 pp - A teenaged boy who has only seen his father about twice a year since he moved out on him and his mother six years ago takes a trip with his father, now a freight truck driver, on his 16th birthday. The son thinks it'll be a great adventure, but his father has other plans. The only item in his cargo compartment is a painting they pick up from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are supposed to deliver to someplace (a private collector?) in the upstate city of Plattsburgh. But en route the father explains he has another one of his cockamamie get-rich-quick schemes - a fake "hijacking" that will yield him a share of the profits when the painting is sold to an illicit buyer. As the father bumbles through his inept plans to become a criminal, it's clear the boy has to act like a father to the man.
6. Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis - 20 pp - A pregnant medical student, Eleanor, and her boyfriend, Bill, a food writer, travel back to his hometown of Cuxabexis, an island off the coast of Maine. While staying with Bill's aunt, Eleanor decides to reveal that she's pregnant - news that later gets blared over the loud speaker at a pep rally for the school's basketball team. (The title, "Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis," is the school fight song.) At the rally, Eleanor also learns Bill was a former star for the team. While connecting with Bill's family, Eleanor daydreams what her future as a mother will hold. There's an interesting undercurrent here about physicality. Eleanor had to teach Bill to be a more interesting lover than a simple piston, but she also has a taste for foreplay that resembles wrestling. She is uncomfortable with cutting open conscious pigs in her surgical training classes, but on the island people have an earthiness that gives them a different relationship with animals. After serving a rabbit dish, Bill's aunt openly admits she likes watching rabbits mate and encourages Eleanor to visit the farm where they're raised. When Eleanor does, the farmer is killing and skinning the rabbits, and Eleanor helps him tie one down before he slaughters it. Meanwhile, Bill is on the court, trying to prove to his nephew, the latest star of the basketball team, that he still has some game.
7. Fighting at Night - 14 pp - An amateur fighter decides to take on an experienced boxer. The story is all about his preparation. His trainer is a woman he shares a house with, along with her boyfriend. To train, he takes on everyone in town willing to spar with him in a makeshift ring they've built in their backyard. He beats all the men in town, including the owner of the hardware store and a few lobstermen. The story takes us right up to the start of the big fight - and details his chance to feel like a champion among all the men in his town. We don't get to see the actual big fight, although the outcome of that seems fairly obvious.
8. Eiders - 14 pp - A father who left his family tries to reconnect with his son while duck hunting. The son expresses his anger by refusing to aim at the birds. Upset that his son isn't honest about his deliberate refusal to hit any targets, the father struggles to articulate why he left but all he can really do is take down more birds, one after another.
9. Seeing the World - 22 pp - 17-year-old Sam becomes an unlikely friend of 35-year-old Johan, when the older man takes a job at the Portland movie theater where Sam works. Sam is an aspiring moviemaker and always has a video camera with him, shooting the daily events of his life and hoping he'll be able to use the footage for his first movie. After reading an article, Johan convinces Sam they can make a killing gathering sea urchins and selling their eggs to the Japanese. Sam's never been anywhere, and he's hungry for experience to fuel his career. He moves down to Point Allison with Johan and they break into an empty summer rental house and begin squatting there. At a fish store, they meet a woman who can actually doing the diving for them. They become an unlikely trio and the woman teaches Sam to dive. Sam develops a crush on her, but wonders if he'll become a third wheel. With his aspirations of becoming a filmmaker intact, Sam has to decide whether he can go through life as a doer or a watcher.
10. Puckheads -42 pp - Two brawling high school hockey players -- Daniel and William, the narrator -- get kicked off the hockey team for causing a near riot at a game. To stay in the private school they attend, they're forced to join the drama club, which is putting on a production of Oliver! There they both develop a crush on a new girl, Christina, a bold young lady and committed actress who's unwilling to take any direction from the drama teacher because she has her own ideas about how the play should be done. ("I think we need to play up the sex.") The two hockey players compete for her attention, and she gets involved with both of them, but it's not clear if she is genuinely interested or trying to inspire better performances out of each of them. When she's making out with William in a school closet, she tells him: "Stop thinking about me as Christina. Think about Nancy [her character], and I'll think about Oliver [his]. It's much easier that way." She does inspire them to take improvisational license, so that their production begins to look like a hockey game.
11. Finches - 17 pp - A terrific character study of a guy who's never been able to hold down jobs or relationships for the long term. He's mistrustful of people and animals, as he notes that compared with human, animals "are equally petty, equally irrational and loathsome." He's working as a delivery man for a veterinarian, but he knows he'll quickly screw up this job as he has every previous one he's had: "if people expect me to disappoint them, I'll do my very best to meet their expectations." He remembers fondly the day he met Dayna, who's recently moved to Point Allison from New York, when he returns her parrot to her loft in a former sardine factory - a very New York, not Maine-like space. Even though the story lets us know he ended up dating Dayna for a year, the piece focuses on that first meeting because, in his view, "The best part had been the beginning, when everything was unknown." And that day may have been his proudest moment: when, with Dayna by his side, he released into the wild a bunch of finches that he rescued from a pet store owner with a snake that would have ended up eating them all.
April 28, 2016
Spoiler-free plot summaries and reviews for each individual story are below. But first . . .
I bought this book from my favorite used bookstore a while ago and only recently got around to finishing it. I bought it mainly because it said on the inside jacket that one of the stories was about two rapscallion kids who have to choose whether or not to help the cop who is chasing them when he starts having a heart attack. I am fascinated by cardiac stuff and love a good moral dilemma, so I thought this book would be grand if only for that story. ”Officer Friendly,” which is the title of this heart attack story, was the first story I read even though it was second in the table of contents. It didn’t live up to my expectations at all. It was too short to address the themes and ideas it wanted to examine. Or rather, the proportion of thought to action made it so that there wasn’t enough space in the thought portion to properly explore the human conditions the story touched upon. While disappointed, I told myself I’d get back to the rest of the book as soon as I had the time. I hoped that the other stories would be more fulfilling and thoughtful, instead being only as momentarily reflective but ultimately careless as the boys in this “Officer Friendly” story.
I was wrong to hope for such a thing. These short stories weren’t written in the way I think short stories should be written. It’s common for authors to write short stories as mere snapshots. While this is what they are, there are good snapshots and bad ones. These were more like photos someone could accidentally take if he had his phone on camera mode without realizing it; they reveal nothing except banal daily activity and leave you to forget about the subjects and move on. The “photos” in this book strive to say so much but are so unfocused and blurry that they can do no more than relay the plot.
I might sell this book back to that used bookstore.
Here are my reviews of each individual story:
The Diver (3/5): Since I’d already read “Officer Friendly” by the time I read this story, I knew what to expect and so wasn’t surprised that “The Diver” didn’t get anything accomplished. It’s about a rich guy who asks a local blue-collar man to help him untangle his boat. After the local man untangles it, the rich guy’s wife asks the local man to stick around for dinner and drinks. The show of strength the local man gave while diving to untangle the boat makes the rich guy feel unmanly, so he’s pretty mad that he has to be near this previewed adversary for even a minute longer than necessary. The rest of the story is basically just a manhood measuring contest.
This story was actually a little better than “Officer Friendly” in that it was more human and nuanced. However, the characters were stereotypical and flat, which canceled out any insight the story may have had.
Officer Friendly (2/5): In this story, two kids are having fun trespassing, but are spotted by a police officer. The officer gives chase and catches the narrator. While the narrator is sitting in the police car talking to the officer, the narrator’s friend comes back and lures the officer out of the car. Once he’s out, the friend runs away, giving the narrator time to flee the vehicle. While the athletic friend is having fun at the obese officer’s expense, the officer falls flat on his face and the two kids dash off. When they turn around and notice that the officer hasn’t gotten up yet, they wonder whether they should help him or keep running and escape the law.
This story had so much to offer, but could not deliver. The ���having fun with the idiot cop” part of the story was so much longer and heavier than the “what kind of people are we going to be” part. This moral dilemma could have had so much more punch if it had been given room to breathe. But, alas, this plot point fell as flat as the officer did when he just couldn’t run anymore.
The Edge of the Forest and the Edge of the Ocean (5/5): This story is about a man who just got with the girl he’s been dreaming about for his whole life and is just starting to feel like he’s getting himself sorted out. As he’s driving to work after spending the night with the girl, he comes across his old high school buddy (who was always the girl-obtaining, sorted-out one) standing on the edge of a bridge. The main guy approaches his buddy and talks to him. They talk about how they used to recklessly walk on this bridge as kids and about how they’ve somehow, strangely, transformed into the grown men they are now.
This story was fantastic. It was just as understated and impotent as the rest of the stories, but managed to make that work in its favor. The powerlessness weaved perfectly into the plot and characters and made the whole story bleak in the strongest way possible. The author should have titled the whole book after this story, instead. It would have made a more interesting title and a better cornerstone.
The Toast (0/5): This one is about a male person of indeterminate age (probably under 30, though) who visits is mom and stepdad at their home. They invite him to a party and warn him about the strange people he’ll see at the party without telling him diddly squat about what “strange” means. The people at the party seem to know who the male person is. However, the male person has never seen any of them before. They ask him to do something shocking and he agrees to do it. It seemed to me that he agreed to do the thing mostly because he wanted to have sex (or at least get funky) with the hot chick who thought she knew him. Never does he ask questions or suggest to these people that he might not be who they think he is. He just agrees to do the thing as soon as he gets the smallest, vaguest hint that it might be an okay thing in the eyes of the partygoers. He doesn’t worry about how appalled most of humanity would be upon hearing such a suggestion.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. It seemed like a bad comedy sketch written by a self-important Drama 1 student who’s trying to disguise the fact the he has nothing to say. The rest of the stories had something to say but were just incapable of saying it. If this one had any insight for me then it was well-hidden. I didn’t care to go back because I was so horrified at the dreadfulness of this tale that I didn’t want to dwell on it a second longer. What a waste of time and trees.
Ride (2/5): This one’s about a kid who’s visiting his dad for the weekend and decides to tag along with his dad on a job. The job is to transport a painting from one place to another. The kid wants to connect with his dad, and so really goes with the flow because he’s a big man now and wants to prove it to himself and his father. When the kid realizes that his dad has different plans for the painting than the buyer had, the kid goes along with it even though things could go sour really fast. Neither straightforward Plan A, nor shady Plan B go according to plan, and the kid and his father are left alone with the painting and with themselves.
“Ride” was pretty darn bland. It was interesting to wonder what would happen when the dad made the decision to go back on his instructions, but it all worked out to mean nothing at all. The loneliness the kid feels almost worked with the disconnectedness of the story, but there were still a couple more steps that needed to be taken for those two components to be able to touch and impact the reader.
Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis (3/5): The only female main character/narrator in the whole book was in this story. She’s a pregnant med student who visits her boyfriend’s hometown in order to get to know his family and friends. In between halfhearted connections, she fantasizes about what her child will be like and, being a surgeon-in-training, wonders about the insides of things and their ability to suffer and feel pain.
This story was a huge refresher, since I was getting pretty tired of those young men lusting after aloof, brown-haired, near-strangers who were plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic. The rest of the book is filled with that exact trope and I was so bored of it. Unfortunately, it started right up again after “Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis.” Are boys really so sex-obsessed that the author thought it would be realistic to fill a whole town with guys who have this particular fantasy? I’m a girl, and popular culture tells me that guys are always thinking about sex. I don’t believe that, though. Men are just as loose or prudent as women are, since we’re all equally human. Perhaps the author is just a little too concerned with writing about sex and couldn’t manage to leave much room in his boys’ mind for other things. But anyways, it wasn’t the central female who made this story acceptable, but her insights and thoughts on life and death and everything in between.
Fighting at Night (2/5): This was about a local boxer who sets up a fight with a big-name boxer. His friend’s wife, whom he has a crush on, trains him for it. He wonders whether he’ll be able to make this fight/this life/this romance work. He fights locals who think they can take him as part of his practice routine, and he takes them all down. He thinks he’s nice and strong and might just be able to beat this big-name guy, but he’s not sure and his friend’s wife is firm and not so encouraging.
I didn’t think much of “Fighting at Night.” In fact, I barely remember it. It was boring and the characters were flat. I really don’t have much to say about it.
Eiders (4/5): This was the only other story in this book that was good. It was about a boy and his father who go out hunting. The father tries to connect with his son. The son won’t shoot the birds and doesn’t help much with the hunting. After a scare involving one of the guns, the father asks the son to do the shooting. While the son is standing around not taking any shots, the father tries to connect with him again- tries to make sure that he knows that he’s just as human as he is and was once young and in-love, too.
Part of the reason I like this one is because it touches upon themes I like; age and experience and the pain of being older and knowing so much but so little at the same time and being expected to be one thing when you’re really just you and no one wants you. “Eiders” was suspenseful and well-written.
Seeing the World (1/5): This story was about a puffed-up but desperate kid who follows his older friend to become an urchin farmer. The desperate kid thinks the older friend, who is a sexual conqueror of sorts, is his key to becoming a big-time filmmaker. He films off and on throughout the adventure, expecting to craft some stellar documentary. When the guys get to the seaside, they team up with a woman who says she’ll do the diving for them since neither of them knows how. The older friends wants to get into bed with this woman, but she says that she wants to be no more than business partners. The desperate kid acts as an almost-silent observer to this power play and convinces himself that he’s standing in the way of their love.
“Seeing the World” was awful. It was pointless and annoying and nothing came to any sort of conclusion. The characters were unrealistic and thoughtless, which made me mad. My anger was not relieved or justified by any turns in the plot or interactions. It just sat there and waiting for some part of the story to make something of itself.
Puckheads (1/5): This was about a couple of high school boys who are kicked off the hockey team and forced into the drama club. The most aloof, brown-haired, near-stranger who is plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic of all time is in this story. I don’t know if she was supposed to be pretentious, shallow, and annoying, but she was so pretentious, shallow, and annoying that I hated her guts. Every sentence about her made me cringe. Both the boys fall in love with her, though, and choose to put their old and solid friendship on the line in order to have chance with her. It was a petty, pointless, and unrealistic conflict.
I liked the friendship between the two boys, and would have liked it if “Puckheads” had been more about that than about the sacrifices a lusty fellow will make if there’s even a piddling chance of romantic entanglement available. The fight these two friends put themselves through meant nothing and bore no fruit (sour or sweet) - much like all the conflicts in this book.
Finches (1/5): This story was about a truck driver who delivers pets from the veterinary office back to their owners’ homes. He buys some finches while at the supply shop his boss goes to because he has a moment of gentleness and sensitivity, which is never backed up or explained, that causes him to want to save the birds from the snake they were going to be fed to. Anyways, with a car full of finches, the driver goes to a lady’s house to return her parakeet to her (I think the author meant to say “parrot” but whatever; parakeet it is). He thinks the lady is attractive and so disregards his orders and tries to help her hang the parakeet’s cage from the ceiling. This fails and the cage is instead placed on the ground. Because the lady is just so darn attractive, the driver randomly asks her if she’d go for a drive with him so that he can show her around town. She agrees.
What a pathetic, empty, conclusion to a pathetic, empty book. I guess all that matters in the town the author is word-painting a portrait of is sex and dogs and hockey and fighting and disobeying the law. Everyone wants deep, personal connections, but cannot make them. This is a beautiful message, and it would have been a beautiful book had the author made the unfulfilled potential of the characters compatible with the unfulfilled promises of the tales.
I bought this book from my favorite used bookstore a while ago and only recently got around to finishing it. I bought it mainly because it said on the inside jacket that one of the stories was about two rapscallion kids who have to choose whether or not to help the cop who is chasing them when he starts having a heart attack. I am fascinated by cardiac stuff and love a good moral dilemma, so I thought this book would be grand if only for that story. ”Officer Friendly,” which is the title of this heart attack story, was the first story I read even though it was second in the table of contents. It didn’t live up to my expectations at all. It was too short to address the themes and ideas it wanted to examine. Or rather, the proportion of thought to action made it so that there wasn’t enough space in the thought portion to properly explore the human conditions the story touched upon. While disappointed, I told myself I’d get back to the rest of the book as soon as I had the time. I hoped that the other stories would be more fulfilling and thoughtful, instead being only as momentarily reflective but ultimately careless as the boys in this “Officer Friendly” story.
I was wrong to hope for such a thing. These short stories weren’t written in the way I think short stories should be written. It’s common for authors to write short stories as mere snapshots. While this is what they are, there are good snapshots and bad ones. These were more like photos someone could accidentally take if he had his phone on camera mode without realizing it; they reveal nothing except banal daily activity and leave you to forget about the subjects and move on. The “photos” in this book strive to say so much but are so unfocused and blurry that they can do no more than relay the plot.
I might sell this book back to that used bookstore.
Here are my reviews of each individual story:
The Diver (3/5): Since I’d already read “Officer Friendly” by the time I read this story, I knew what to expect and so wasn’t surprised that “The Diver” didn’t get anything accomplished. It’s about a rich guy who asks a local blue-collar man to help him untangle his boat. After the local man untangles it, the rich guy’s wife asks the local man to stick around for dinner and drinks. The show of strength the local man gave while diving to untangle the boat makes the rich guy feel unmanly, so he’s pretty mad that he has to be near this previewed adversary for even a minute longer than necessary. The rest of the story is basically just a manhood measuring contest.
This story was actually a little better than “Officer Friendly” in that it was more human and nuanced. However, the characters were stereotypical and flat, which canceled out any insight the story may have had.
Officer Friendly (2/5): In this story, two kids are having fun trespassing, but are spotted by a police officer. The officer gives chase and catches the narrator. While the narrator is sitting in the police car talking to the officer, the narrator’s friend comes back and lures the officer out of the car. Once he’s out, the friend runs away, giving the narrator time to flee the vehicle. While the athletic friend is having fun at the obese officer’s expense, the officer falls flat on his face and the two kids dash off. When they turn around and notice that the officer hasn’t gotten up yet, they wonder whether they should help him or keep running and escape the law.
This story had so much to offer, but could not deliver. The ���having fun with the idiot cop” part of the story was so much longer and heavier than the “what kind of people are we going to be” part. This moral dilemma could have had so much more punch if it had been given room to breathe. But, alas, this plot point fell as flat as the officer did when he just couldn’t run anymore.
The Edge of the Forest and the Edge of the Ocean (5/5): This story is about a man who just got with the girl he’s been dreaming about for his whole life and is just starting to feel like he’s getting himself sorted out. As he’s driving to work after spending the night with the girl, he comes across his old high school buddy (who was always the girl-obtaining, sorted-out one) standing on the edge of a bridge. The main guy approaches his buddy and talks to him. They talk about how they used to recklessly walk on this bridge as kids and about how they’ve somehow, strangely, transformed into the grown men they are now.
This story was fantastic. It was just as understated and impotent as the rest of the stories, but managed to make that work in its favor. The powerlessness weaved perfectly into the plot and characters and made the whole story bleak in the strongest way possible. The author should have titled the whole book after this story, instead. It would have made a more interesting title and a better cornerstone.
The Toast (0/5): This one is about a male person of indeterminate age (probably under 30, though) who visits is mom and stepdad at their home. They invite him to a party and warn him about the strange people he’ll see at the party without telling him diddly squat about what “strange” means. The people at the party seem to know who the male person is. However, the male person has never seen any of them before. They ask him to do something shocking and he agrees to do it. It seemed to me that he agreed to do the thing mostly because he wanted to have sex (or at least get funky) with the hot chick who thought she knew him. Never does he ask questions or suggest to these people that he might not be who they think he is. He just agrees to do the thing as soon as he gets the smallest, vaguest hint that it might be an okay thing in the eyes of the partygoers. He doesn’t worry about how appalled most of humanity would be upon hearing such a suggestion.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. It seemed like a bad comedy sketch written by a self-important Drama 1 student who’s trying to disguise the fact the he has nothing to say. The rest of the stories had something to say but were just incapable of saying it. If this one had any insight for me then it was well-hidden. I didn’t care to go back because I was so horrified at the dreadfulness of this tale that I didn’t want to dwell on it a second longer. What a waste of time and trees.
Ride (2/5): This one’s about a kid who’s visiting his dad for the weekend and decides to tag along with his dad on a job. The job is to transport a painting from one place to another. The kid wants to connect with his dad, and so really goes with the flow because he’s a big man now and wants to prove it to himself and his father. When the kid realizes that his dad has different plans for the painting than the buyer had, the kid goes along with it even though things could go sour really fast. Neither straightforward Plan A, nor shady Plan B go according to plan, and the kid and his father are left alone with the painting and with themselves.
“Ride” was pretty darn bland. It was interesting to wonder what would happen when the dad made the decision to go back on his instructions, but it all worked out to mean nothing at all. The loneliness the kid feels almost worked with the disconnectedness of the story, but there were still a couple more steps that needed to be taken for those two components to be able to touch and impact the reader.
Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis (3/5): The only female main character/narrator in the whole book was in this story. She’s a pregnant med student who visits her boyfriend’s hometown in order to get to know his family and friends. In between halfhearted connections, she fantasizes about what her child will be like and, being a surgeon-in-training, wonders about the insides of things and their ability to suffer and feel pain.
This story was a huge refresher, since I was getting pretty tired of those young men lusting after aloof, brown-haired, near-strangers who were plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic. The rest of the book is filled with that exact trope and I was so bored of it. Unfortunately, it started right up again after “Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis.” Are boys really so sex-obsessed that the author thought it would be realistic to fill a whole town with guys who have this particular fantasy? I’m a girl, and popular culture tells me that guys are always thinking about sex. I don’t believe that, though. Men are just as loose or prudent as women are, since we’re all equally human. Perhaps the author is just a little too concerned with writing about sex and couldn’t manage to leave much room in his boys’ mind for other things. But anyways, it wasn’t the central female who made this story acceptable, but her insights and thoughts on life and death and everything in between.
Fighting at Night (2/5): This was about a local boxer who sets up a fight with a big-name boxer. His friend’s wife, whom he has a crush on, trains him for it. He wonders whether he’ll be able to make this fight/this life/this romance work. He fights locals who think they can take him as part of his practice routine, and he takes them all down. He thinks he’s nice and strong and might just be able to beat this big-name guy, but he’s not sure and his friend’s wife is firm and not so encouraging.
I didn’t think much of “Fighting at Night.” In fact, I barely remember it. It was boring and the characters were flat. I really don’t have much to say about it.
Eiders (4/5): This was the only other story in this book that was good. It was about a boy and his father who go out hunting. The father tries to connect with his son. The son won’t shoot the birds and doesn’t help much with the hunting. After a scare involving one of the guns, the father asks the son to do the shooting. While the son is standing around not taking any shots, the father tries to connect with him again- tries to make sure that he knows that he’s just as human as he is and was once young and in-love, too.
Part of the reason I like this one is because it touches upon themes I like; age and experience and the pain of being older and knowing so much but so little at the same time and being expected to be one thing when you’re really just you and no one wants you. “Eiders” was suspenseful and well-written.
Seeing the World (1/5): This story was about a puffed-up but desperate kid who follows his older friend to become an urchin farmer. The desperate kid thinks the older friend, who is a sexual conqueror of sorts, is his key to becoming a big-time filmmaker. He films off and on throughout the adventure, expecting to craft some stellar documentary. When the guys get to the seaside, they team up with a woman who says she’ll do the diving for them since neither of them knows how. The older friends wants to get into bed with this woman, but she says that she wants to be no more than business partners. The desperate kid acts as an almost-silent observer to this power play and convinces himself that he’s standing in the way of their love.
“Seeing the World” was awful. It was pointless and annoying and nothing came to any sort of conclusion. The characters were unrealistic and thoughtless, which made me mad. My anger was not relieved or justified by any turns in the plot or interactions. It just sat there and waiting for some part of the story to make something of itself.
Puckheads (1/5): This was about a couple of high school boys who are kicked off the hockey team and forced into the drama club. The most aloof, brown-haired, near-stranger who is plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic of all time is in this story. I don’t know if she was supposed to be pretentious, shallow, and annoying, but she was so pretentious, shallow, and annoying that I hated her guts. Every sentence about her made me cringe. Both the boys fall in love with her, though, and choose to put their old and solid friendship on the line in order to have chance with her. It was a petty, pointless, and unrealistic conflict.
I liked the friendship between the two boys, and would have liked it if “Puckheads” had been more about that than about the sacrifices a lusty fellow will make if there’s even a piddling chance of romantic entanglement available. The fight these two friends put themselves through meant nothing and bore no fruit (sour or sweet) - much like all the conflicts in this book.
Finches (1/5): This story was about a truck driver who delivers pets from the veterinary office back to their owners’ homes. He buys some finches while at the supply shop his boss goes to because he has a moment of gentleness and sensitivity, which is never backed up or explained, that causes him to want to save the birds from the snake they were going to be fed to. Anyways, with a car full of finches, the driver goes to a lady’s house to return her parakeet to her (I think the author meant to say “parrot” but whatever; parakeet it is). He thinks the lady is attractive and so disregards his orders and tries to help her hang the parakeet’s cage from the ceiling. This fails and the cage is instead placed on the ground. Because the lady is just so darn attractive, the driver randomly asks her if she’d go for a drive with him so that he can show her around town. She agrees.
What a pathetic, empty, conclusion to a pathetic, empty book. I guess all that matters in the town the author is word-painting a portrait of is sex and dogs and hockey and fighting and disobeying the law. Everyone wants deep, personal connections, but cannot make them. This is a beautiful message, and it would have been a beautiful book had the author made the unfulfilled potential of the characters compatible with the unfulfilled promises of the tales.
February 26, 2017
Spoiler-free plot summaries and reviews for each individual story are below. But first . . .
I bought this book from my favorite used bookstore a while ago and only recently got around to finishing it. I bought it mainly because it said on the inside jacket that one of the stories was about two rapscallion kids who have to choose whether or not to help the cop who is chasing them when he starts having a heart attack. I am fascinated by cardiac stuff and love a good moral dilemma, so I thought this book would be grand if only for that story. ”Officer Friendly,” which is the title of this heart attack story, was the first story I read even though it was second in the table of contents. It didn’t live up to my expectations at all. It was too short to address the themes and ideas it wanted to examine. Or rather, the proportion of thought to action made it so that there wasn’t enough space in the thought portion to properly explore the human conditions the story touched upon. While disappointed, I told myself I’d get back to the rest of the book as soon as I had the time. I hoped that the other stories would be more fulfilling and thoughtful, instead being only as momentarily reflective but ultimately careless as the boys in this “Officer Friendly” story.
I was wrong to hope for such a thing. These short stories weren’t written in the way I think short stories should be written. It’s common for authors to write short stories as mere snapshots. While this is what they are, there are good snapshots and bad ones. These were more like photos someone could accidentally take if he had his phone on camera mode without realizing it; they reveal nothing except banal daily activity and leave you to forget about the subjects and move on. The “photos” in this book strive to say so much but are so unfocused and blurry that they can do no more than relay the plot.
I might sell this book back to that used bookstore.
Here are my reviews of each individual story:
The Diver (3/5): Since I’d already read “Officer Friendly” by the time I read this story, I knew what to expect and so wasn’t surprised that “The Diver” didn’t get anything accomplished. It’s about a rich guy who asks a local blue-collar man to help him untangle his boat. After the local man untangles it, the rich guy’s wife asks the local man to stick around for dinner and drinks. The show of strength the local man gave while diving to untangle the boat makes the rich guy feel unmanly, so he’s pretty mad that he has to be near this perceived adversary for even a minute longer than necessary. The rest of the story is basically just a manhood measuring contest.
This story was actually a little better than “Officer Friendly” in that it was more human and nuanced. However, the characters were stereotypical and flat, which canceled out any insight the story may have had.
Officer Friendly (2/5): In this story, two kids are having fun trespassing, but are spotted by a police officer. The officer gives chase and catches the narrator. While the narrator is sitting in the police car talking to the officer, the narrator’s friend comes back and lures the officer out of the car. Once he’s out, the friend runs away, giving the narrator time to flee the vehicle. While the athletic friend is having fun at the obese officer’s expense, the officer falls flat on his face and the two kids dash off. When they turn around and notice that the officer hasn’t gotten up yet, they wonder whether they should help him or keep running and escape the law.
This story had so much to offer, but could not deliver. The “having fun with the idiot cop” part of the story was so much longer and heavier than the “what kind of people are we going to be” part. This moral dilemma could have had so much more punch if it had been given room to breathe. But, alas, this plot point fell as flat as the officer did when he just couldn’t run anymore.
The Edge of the Forest and the Edge of the Ocean (5/5): This story is about a man who just got with the girl he’s been dreaming about for his whole life and is just starting to feel like he’s getting himself sorted out. As he’s driving to work after spending the night with the girl, he comes across his old high school buddy (who was always the girl-obtaining, sorted-out one) standing on the edge of a bridge. The main guy approaches his buddy and talks to him. They talk about how they used to recklessly walk on this bridge as kids and about how they’ve somehow, strangely, transformed into the grown men they are now.
This story was fantastic. It was just as understated and impotent as the rest of the stories, but managed to make that work in its favor. The powerlessness weaved perfectly into the plot and characters and made the whole story bleak in the strongest way possible. The author should have titled the whole book after this story, instead. It would have made a more interesting title and a better cornerstone.
The Toast (0/5): This one is about a male person of indeterminate age (probably under 30, though) who visits is mom and stepdad at their home. They invite him to a party and warn him about the strange people he’ll see at the party without telling him diddly squat about what “strange” means. The people at the party seem to know who the male person is. However, the male person has never seen any of them before. They ask him to do something shocking and he agrees to do it. It seemed to me that he agreed to do the thing mostly because he wanted to have sex (or at least get funky) with the hot chick who thought she knew him. Never does he ask questions or suggest to these people that he might not be who they think he is. He just agrees to do the thing as soon as he gets the smallest, vaguest hint that it might be an okay thing in the eyes of the partygoers. He doesn’t worry about how appalled most of humanity would be upon hearing such a suggestion.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. It seemed like a bad comedy sketch written by a self-important Drama 1 student who’s trying to disguise the fact the he has nothing to say. The rest of the stories had something to say but were just incapable of saying it. If this one had any insight for me then it was well-hidden. I didn’t care to go back because I was so horrified at the dreadfulness of this tale that I didn’t want to dwell on it a second longer. What a waste of time and trees.
Ride (2/5): This one’s about a kid who’s visiting his dad for the weekend and decides to tag along with his dad on a job. The job is to transport a painting from one place to another. The kid wants to connect with his dad, and so really goes with the flow because he’s a big man now and wants to prove it to himself and his father. When the kid realizes that his dad has different plans for the painting than the buyer had, the kid goes along with it even though things could go sour really fast. Neither straightforward Plan A, nor shady Plan B go according to plan, and the kid and his father are left alone with the painting and with themselves.
“Ride” was pretty darn bland. It was interesting to wonder what would happen when the dad made the decision to go back on his instructions, but it all worked out to mean nothing at all. The loneliness the kid feels almost worked with the disconnectedness of the story, but there were still a couple more steps that needed to be taken for those two components to be able to touch and impact the reader.
Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis (3/5): The only female main character/narrator in the whole book was in this story. She’s a pregnant med student who visits her boyfriend’s hometown in order to get to know his family and friends. In between halfhearted connections, she fantasizes about what her child will be like and, being a surgeon-in-training, wonders about the insides of things and their ability to suffer and feel pain.
This story was a huge refresher, since I was getting pretty tired of those young men lusting after aloof, brown-haired, near-strangers who were plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic. The rest of the book is filled with that exact trope and I was so bored of it. Unfortunately, it started right up again after “Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis.” Are boys really so sex-obsessed that the author thought it would be realistic to fill a whole town with guys who have this particular fantasy? I’m a girl, and popular culture tells me that guys are always thinking about sex. I don’t believe that, though. Men are just as loose or prudent as women are, since we’re all equally human. Perhaps the author is just a little too concerned with writing about sex and couldn’t manage to leave much room in his boys’ mind for other things. But anyways, it wasn’t the central female who made this story acceptable, but her insights and thoughts on life and death and everything in between.
Fighting at Night (2/5): This was about a local boxer who sets up a fight with a big-name boxer. His friend’s wife, whom he has a crush on, trains him for it. He wonders whether he’ll be able to make this fight/this life/this romance work. He fights locals who think they can take him as part of his practice routine, and he takes them all down. He thinks he’s nice and strong and might just be able to beat this big-name guy, but he’s not sure and his friend’s wife is firm and not so encouraging.
I didn’t think much of “Fighting at Night.” In fact, I barely remember it. It was boring and the characters were flat. I really don’t have much to say about it.
Eiders (4/5): This was the only other story in this book that was good. It was about a boy and his father who go out hunting. The father tries to connect with his son. The son won’t shoot the birds and doesn’t help much with the hunting. After a scare involving one of the guns, the father asks the son to do the shooting. While the son is standing around not taking any shots, the father tries to connect with him again- tries to make sure that he knows that he’s just as human as he is and was once young and in-love, too.
Part of the reason I like this one is because it touches upon themes I like; age and experience and the pain of being older and knowing so much but so little at the same time and being expected to be one thing when you’re really just you and no one wants you. “Eiders” was suspenseful and well-written.
Seeing the World (1/5): This story was about a puffed-up but desperate kid who follows his older friend to become an urchin farmer. The desperate kid thinks the older friend, who is a sexual conqueror of sorts, is his key to becoming a big-time filmmaker. He films off and on throughout the adventure, expecting to craft some stellar documentary. When the guys get to the seaside, they team up with a woman who says she’ll do the diving for them since neither of them knows how. The older friends wants to get into bed with this woman, but she says that she wants to be no more than business partners. The desperate kid acts as an almost-silent observer to this power play and convinces himself that he’s standing in the way of their love.
“Seeing the World” was awful. It was pointless and annoying and nothing came to any sort of conclusion. The characters were unrealistic and thoughtless, which made me mad. My anger was not relieved or justified by any turns in the plot or interactions. It just sat there and waiting for some part of the story to make something of itself.
Puckheads (1/5): This was about a couple of high school boys who are kicked off the hockey team and forced into the drama club. The most aloof, brown-haired, near-stranger who is plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic of all time is in this story. I don’t know if she was supposed to be pretentious, shallow, and annoying, but she was so pretentious, shallow, and annoying that I hated her guts. Every sentence about her made me cringe. Both the boys fall in love with her, though, and choose to put their old and solid friendship on the line in order to have chance with her. It was a petty, pointless, and unrealistic conflict.
I liked the friendship between the two boys, and would have liked it if “Puckheads” had been more about that than about the sacrifices a lusty fellow will make if there’s even a piddling chance of romantic entanglement available. The fight these two friends put themselves through meant nothing and bore no fruit (sour or sweet) - much like all the conflicts in this book.
Finches (1/5): This story was about a truck driver who delivers pets from the veterinary office back to their owners’ homes. He buys some finches while at the supply shop his boss goes to because he has a moment of gentleness and sensitivity, which is never backed up or explained, that causes him to want to save the birds from the snake they were going to be fed to. Anyways, with a car full of finches, the driver goes to a lady’s house to return her parakeet to her (I think the author meant to say “parrot” but whatever; parakeet it is). He thinks the lady is attractive and so disregards his orders and tries to help her hang the parakeet’s cage from the ceiling. This fails and the cage is instead placed on the ground. Because the lady is just so darn attractive, the driver randomly asks her if she’d go for a drive with him so that he can show her around town. She agrees.
What a pathetic, empty, conclusion to a pathetic, empty book. I guess all that matters in the town the author is word-painting a portrait of is sex and dogs and hockey and fighting and disobeying the law. Everyone wants deep, personal connections, but cannot make them. This is a beautiful message, and it would have been a beautiful book had the author made the unfulfilled potential of the characters compatible with the unfulfilled promises of the tales.
I bought this book from my favorite used bookstore a while ago and only recently got around to finishing it. I bought it mainly because it said on the inside jacket that one of the stories was about two rapscallion kids who have to choose whether or not to help the cop who is chasing them when he starts having a heart attack. I am fascinated by cardiac stuff and love a good moral dilemma, so I thought this book would be grand if only for that story. ”Officer Friendly,” which is the title of this heart attack story, was the first story I read even though it was second in the table of contents. It didn’t live up to my expectations at all. It was too short to address the themes and ideas it wanted to examine. Or rather, the proportion of thought to action made it so that there wasn’t enough space in the thought portion to properly explore the human conditions the story touched upon. While disappointed, I told myself I’d get back to the rest of the book as soon as I had the time. I hoped that the other stories would be more fulfilling and thoughtful, instead being only as momentarily reflective but ultimately careless as the boys in this “Officer Friendly” story.
I was wrong to hope for such a thing. These short stories weren’t written in the way I think short stories should be written. It’s common for authors to write short stories as mere snapshots. While this is what they are, there are good snapshots and bad ones. These were more like photos someone could accidentally take if he had his phone on camera mode without realizing it; they reveal nothing except banal daily activity and leave you to forget about the subjects and move on. The “photos” in this book strive to say so much but are so unfocused and blurry that they can do no more than relay the plot.
I might sell this book back to that used bookstore.
Here are my reviews of each individual story:
The Diver (3/5): Since I’d already read “Officer Friendly” by the time I read this story, I knew what to expect and so wasn’t surprised that “The Diver” didn’t get anything accomplished. It’s about a rich guy who asks a local blue-collar man to help him untangle his boat. After the local man untangles it, the rich guy’s wife asks the local man to stick around for dinner and drinks. The show of strength the local man gave while diving to untangle the boat makes the rich guy feel unmanly, so he’s pretty mad that he has to be near this perceived adversary for even a minute longer than necessary. The rest of the story is basically just a manhood measuring contest.
This story was actually a little better than “Officer Friendly” in that it was more human and nuanced. However, the characters were stereotypical and flat, which canceled out any insight the story may have had.
Officer Friendly (2/5): In this story, two kids are having fun trespassing, but are spotted by a police officer. The officer gives chase and catches the narrator. While the narrator is sitting in the police car talking to the officer, the narrator’s friend comes back and lures the officer out of the car. Once he’s out, the friend runs away, giving the narrator time to flee the vehicle. While the athletic friend is having fun at the obese officer’s expense, the officer falls flat on his face and the two kids dash off. When they turn around and notice that the officer hasn’t gotten up yet, they wonder whether they should help him or keep running and escape the law.
This story had so much to offer, but could not deliver. The “having fun with the idiot cop” part of the story was so much longer and heavier than the “what kind of people are we going to be” part. This moral dilemma could have had so much more punch if it had been given room to breathe. But, alas, this plot point fell as flat as the officer did when he just couldn’t run anymore.
The Edge of the Forest and the Edge of the Ocean (5/5): This story is about a man who just got with the girl he’s been dreaming about for his whole life and is just starting to feel like he’s getting himself sorted out. As he’s driving to work after spending the night with the girl, he comes across his old high school buddy (who was always the girl-obtaining, sorted-out one) standing on the edge of a bridge. The main guy approaches his buddy and talks to him. They talk about how they used to recklessly walk on this bridge as kids and about how they’ve somehow, strangely, transformed into the grown men they are now.
This story was fantastic. It was just as understated and impotent as the rest of the stories, but managed to make that work in its favor. The powerlessness weaved perfectly into the plot and characters and made the whole story bleak in the strongest way possible. The author should have titled the whole book after this story, instead. It would have made a more interesting title and a better cornerstone.
The Toast (0/5): This one is about a male person of indeterminate age (probably under 30, though) who visits is mom and stepdad at their home. They invite him to a party and warn him about the strange people he’ll see at the party without telling him diddly squat about what “strange” means. The people at the party seem to know who the male person is. However, the male person has never seen any of them before. They ask him to do something shocking and he agrees to do it. It seemed to me that he agreed to do the thing mostly because he wanted to have sex (or at least get funky) with the hot chick who thought she knew him. Never does he ask questions or suggest to these people that he might not be who they think he is. He just agrees to do the thing as soon as he gets the smallest, vaguest hint that it might be an okay thing in the eyes of the partygoers. He doesn’t worry about how appalled most of humanity would be upon hearing such a suggestion.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. It seemed like a bad comedy sketch written by a self-important Drama 1 student who’s trying to disguise the fact the he has nothing to say. The rest of the stories had something to say but were just incapable of saying it. If this one had any insight for me then it was well-hidden. I didn’t care to go back because I was so horrified at the dreadfulness of this tale that I didn’t want to dwell on it a second longer. What a waste of time and trees.
Ride (2/5): This one’s about a kid who’s visiting his dad for the weekend and decides to tag along with his dad on a job. The job is to transport a painting from one place to another. The kid wants to connect with his dad, and so really goes with the flow because he’s a big man now and wants to prove it to himself and his father. When the kid realizes that his dad has different plans for the painting than the buyer had, the kid goes along with it even though things could go sour really fast. Neither straightforward Plan A, nor shady Plan B go according to plan, and the kid and his father are left alone with the painting and with themselves.
“Ride” was pretty darn bland. It was interesting to wonder what would happen when the dad made the decision to go back on his instructions, but it all worked out to mean nothing at all. The loneliness the kid feels almost worked with the disconnectedness of the story, but there were still a couple more steps that needed to be taken for those two components to be able to touch and impact the reader.
Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis (3/5): The only female main character/narrator in the whole book was in this story. She’s a pregnant med student who visits her boyfriend’s hometown in order to get to know his family and friends. In between halfhearted connections, she fantasizes about what her child will be like and, being a surgeon-in-training, wonders about the insides of things and their ability to suffer and feel pain.
This story was a huge refresher, since I was getting pretty tired of those young men lusting after aloof, brown-haired, near-strangers who were plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic. The rest of the book is filled with that exact trope and I was so bored of it. Unfortunately, it started right up again after “Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis.” Are boys really so sex-obsessed that the author thought it would be realistic to fill a whole town with guys who have this particular fantasy? I’m a girl, and popular culture tells me that guys are always thinking about sex. I don’t believe that, though. Men are just as loose or prudent as women are, since we’re all equally human. Perhaps the author is just a little too concerned with writing about sex and couldn’t manage to leave much room in his boys’ mind for other things. But anyways, it wasn’t the central female who made this story acceptable, but her insights and thoughts on life and death and everything in between.
Fighting at Night (2/5): This was about a local boxer who sets up a fight with a big-name boxer. His friend’s wife, whom he has a crush on, trains him for it. He wonders whether he’ll be able to make this fight/this life/this romance work. He fights locals who think they can take him as part of his practice routine, and he takes them all down. He thinks he’s nice and strong and might just be able to beat this big-name guy, but he’s not sure and his friend’s wife is firm and not so encouraging.
I didn’t think much of “Fighting at Night.” In fact, I barely remember it. It was boring and the characters were flat. I really don’t have much to say about it.
Eiders (4/5): This was the only other story in this book that was good. It was about a boy and his father who go out hunting. The father tries to connect with his son. The son won’t shoot the birds and doesn’t help much with the hunting. After a scare involving one of the guns, the father asks the son to do the shooting. While the son is standing around not taking any shots, the father tries to connect with him again- tries to make sure that he knows that he’s just as human as he is and was once young and in-love, too.
Part of the reason I like this one is because it touches upon themes I like; age and experience and the pain of being older and knowing so much but so little at the same time and being expected to be one thing when you’re really just you and no one wants you. “Eiders” was suspenseful and well-written.
Seeing the World (1/5): This story was about a puffed-up but desperate kid who follows his older friend to become an urchin farmer. The desperate kid thinks the older friend, who is a sexual conqueror of sorts, is his key to becoming a big-time filmmaker. He films off and on throughout the adventure, expecting to craft some stellar documentary. When the guys get to the seaside, they team up with a woman who says she’ll do the diving for them since neither of them knows how. The older friends wants to get into bed with this woman, but she says that she wants to be no more than business partners. The desperate kid acts as an almost-silent observer to this power play and convinces himself that he’s standing in the way of their love.
“Seeing the World” was awful. It was pointless and annoying and nothing came to any sort of conclusion. The characters were unrealistic and thoughtless, which made me mad. My anger was not relieved or justified by any turns in the plot or interactions. It just sat there and waiting for some part of the story to make something of itself.
Puckheads (1/5): This was about a couple of high school boys who are kicked off the hockey team and forced into the drama club. The most aloof, brown-haired, near-stranger who is plain or ugly except for one remarkable characteristic of all time is in this story. I don’t know if she was supposed to be pretentious, shallow, and annoying, but she was so pretentious, shallow, and annoying that I hated her guts. Every sentence about her made me cringe. Both the boys fall in love with her, though, and choose to put their old and solid friendship on the line in order to have chance with her. It was a petty, pointless, and unrealistic conflict.
I liked the friendship between the two boys, and would have liked it if “Puckheads” had been more about that than about the sacrifices a lusty fellow will make if there’s even a piddling chance of romantic entanglement available. The fight these two friends put themselves through meant nothing and bore no fruit (sour or sweet) - much like all the conflicts in this book.
Finches (1/5): This story was about a truck driver who delivers pets from the veterinary office back to their owners’ homes. He buys some finches while at the supply shop his boss goes to because he has a moment of gentleness and sensitivity, which is never backed up or explained, that causes him to want to save the birds from the snake they were going to be fed to. Anyways, with a car full of finches, the driver goes to a lady’s house to return her parakeet to her (I think the author meant to say “parrot” but whatever; parakeet it is). He thinks the lady is attractive and so disregards his orders and tries to help her hang the parakeet’s cage from the ceiling. This fails and the cage is instead placed on the ground. Because the lady is just so darn attractive, the driver randomly asks her if she’d go for a drive with him so that he can show her around town. She agrees.
What a pathetic, empty, conclusion to a pathetic, empty book. I guess all that matters in the town the author is word-painting a portrait of is sex and dogs and hockey and fighting and disobeying the law. Everyone wants deep, personal connections, but cannot make them. This is a beautiful message, and it would have been a beautiful book had the author made the unfulfilled potential of the characters compatible with the unfulfilled promises of the tales.
October 21, 2025
Absolutely loved this collection! I used it with a small group of students and we had great discussions based off of the stories. Hoping to reach out to Lewis and ask some follow up questions about some characters and some of his writing!
March 11, 2016
I did not like this collection of short stories any more than I like Robinson's novel, the name of which I have apparently forgotten.
Why did I try his short stories? I saw some good characterization and crisp sense of place in his novel. Sometimes short stories work better. A faster pace, a quicker character development. So I gave them a try. He is just not the author for me.
The only stories that sort of stayed with me were the one about the man fishing with his wife - because of the continual implied threat of violence, which hung around well - and the one about the loser guy and his loser friend fishing for anenomes - pretty much because I kept expecting some violence, too. They were slightly disturbing. Which is not a recommendation!
Perhaps my criticism is this: I find no redeeming qualities in his work. Perhaps he did not mean to put any in there!
Why did I try his short stories? I saw some good characterization and crisp sense of place in his novel. Sometimes short stories work better. A faster pace, a quicker character development. So I gave them a try. He is just not the author for me.
The only stories that sort of stayed with me were the one about the man fishing with his wife - because of the continual implied threat of violence, which hung around well - and the one about the loser guy and his loser friend fishing for anenomes - pretty much because I kept expecting some violence, too. They were slightly disturbing. Which is not a recommendation!
Perhaps my criticism is this: I find no redeeming qualities in his work. Perhaps he did not mean to put any in there!
October 30, 2007
I read this after listening to "Selected Shorts" on KQED one Saturday evening. I actually went and found the book. It might have helped that one of those "THAT guy" actors read it out loud (you know, THAT guy), but it also helped that it was about the unforgiving mysterious state of Maine.
June 21, 2009
These stories put me in a different world, even though the world was my own.Water Dogs A Novel
July 18, 2011
This writer certainly has promise, but outside of the fact that many of his stories don't really seem to end, he spends an awful lot of time wishing his characters could get blow-jobs. After a while, it got kinda old.
September 4, 2007
A pretty collection of Maine-based stories. The clear highlight is the delectably perverse "The Toast," a brilliant piece of pitch black comedy.
September 12, 2007
Big-hearted, sometimes hilarious stories about the oddities of life in Maine.
January 4, 2008
Lewis Robinson captures Mid-coast Maine and its characters in these finely-told stories.
December 5, 2009
One of those short story books that you can't put down.
May 29, 2016
A mediocre mix of short stories that I eventually finished, Some relatable enogh to be pleasant, others odd enough to be disturbing.
January 23, 2014
Absolutely love Robinson. Beautiful prose, real, truthful voice. "Officer Friendly" is a gem.
June 11, 2016
I enjoyed how the seasons changed throughout the stories, but that's about it
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