Something That Feels Like Truth

by Donald Lystra

Donald Lystra's first novel, Something That Feels Like Truth, was the winner of the 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction. This volume gathers a bracing selection of short stories by Lystra that are cut from the same cloth as his highly acclaimed novel. The stories in Something That Feels Like Truth confound expected plot turns, and Lystra develops his characters patiently and naturally, bringing them into convincing and honest actions. Every plot point in every story here holds an integral part in the imbuing of its beauty and meaning. You can also tell Lystra has read a lot of Hemingway and and that he aspires to be an inheritor of their effectively concise tradition. But there's a touch of Cheever in Lystra's stories as what that master storyteller did for the suburbs of New York, Lystra does for the Midwest.

Genres: Fiction

164 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2013

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I like this guy! He came to writing late, but has been working very hard at it. He's local, and since he's coming to things at a later age, he's content to publish in a regional press. I fear the cold cruel world might overlook this fine work. Here's a little thing I wrote about this collection of short stories a few years ago:

We’ve all heard the longing: “If I’m going to write the book(s) I need to write, I need to quit my job and get to it.” Most of us never do it, but Ann Arborite Donald Lystra is living the dream. After a long and successful career as an engineer, he started writing. He found a writers’ circle to support him and offer direction. He began publishing his stories in the kinds of magazines U-M’s ambitious MFA students dream about appearing in. He published a lovely novel, Season of Water and Ice, with a small regional press, and it was picked as a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. And now he has published, Something That Feels like Truth, a collection of precise and deeply imagined short stories.

Lystra’s stories often take expected strategies and turn them on their fictional heads. For instance in, “Parallel Universe,” the classic American “road story” becomes a tale about an aging son who drives his ill mother from Michigan to Florida. The mother is on oxygen, and it’s running out! In “The Five O’clock Train” a couple in late middle age may have stayed together longer than the limits of love allow. They return to Paris to recapture the joy of their honeymoon, but an encounter with the place where Van Gogh died instead brings their tensions to a head, and perhaps to a kind of resolution. The beautiful thing about Lystra’s stories is that he never tells us if his characters find that resolution, yet the uncertainty feels right.

One of my favorites is the deceptively simple “Marseille.” That tough port city in the south of France doesn’t play much of a part in the story. It is just an interesting name that seems to provide an alternative to a man with an ordinary life that seems to be getting worse. The narrator works in a factory in Saginaw, until he loses his job. It’s a conversation those of us who live here can recognize: “Just before the first shift ended Sammy Niswick called me in and said that orders were way down. It was the state of the economy, he said, the goddamned economy. So they had to cut payroll. It was unfortunate but they had no choice.” That language is so simple that it feels absolutely direct, almost not written but recorded. And that is the pleasure of Lystra’s writing; it has an absolute clarity.

The narrator worries about telling his wife, and imagines how wonderful life must be in Marseille. He goes fishing, has coffee and cheesecake at the Empire Cafe with his wife and friends, and almost does something that might destroy his life. But he is called back to the ordinary–called back to love. Even though Lystra’s readers understand that might not be the end of the question, it is at least a temporary answer. In these remarkable short stories, the action comes without drama, the wisdom without sermon or lecture.



https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Scott Southard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently I reviewed this book on WKAR's radio show Current State. You can hear my review here: http://wkar.org/post/book-review-dona...

You can also read my review below.

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Book Review: Something that Feels like Truth by Donald Lystra

Traditionally, short stories are birthed out of what-ifs.

What if you go to Mars and find dead relatives? What if a sea monster confuses a fog horn with a mating call? Both of those examples, by the way, are from master short story writer Ray Bradbury.

In Donald Lystra’s latest story collection Something that Feels Like Truth, he does something very different from Bradbury. In many ways, his Michigan short stories are not what-ifs but episodes. They are brief glimpses into the lives of real people, and each is at a turning point or a moment of self-realization. These are character studies focused more on the emotional impact of a moment than on a surprising plot twist.

While most of these stories are based in Michigan or filled with Michigan-like characters, the funny thing is my favorite story doesn’t even take place in our state but instead in France. The story “The Five O’Clock Train” follows a struggling married couple vacationing. She is artistic, he is more analytical and tolerates what he considers her romantic view of the world. Their relationship comes to a head while visiting the last resting place of Vincent Van Gogh.

Lystra’s stories are each very well written and captivating. There are no sea creatures, but normal people with normal problems. And while there are no ghosts either, each of his characters is are haunted by choices that they’ve made in their pasts and the choices they will make before their story comes to an end.

The only complaint I have would make with this fascinating collection of short stories is they can feel kind of redundant at times. Most of the stories involve men in the later end of middle age, you never get the female perspective really, and everyone’s relationship is usually on the brink of disaster or just afterwards. There are also themes of lost youth and approaching demise that seems to run throughout. These are not stories about beginnings, but endings. Rather bleak when put all together in one book.

Something that Feels like Truth is a 2014 Michigan Notable Book selection, and it definitely deserves it. The writing is first rate. Lystra was once an engineer and you can almost feel that necessary precision in his writing. While the prose won’t sweep you away with its beauty, there is an exactness that emphasizes the truth in his words. This is a wonderful collection, but a part of me wishes it included at least one monster.

A monster in Lystra’s world would’ve been a fun what-if.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of sweet short stories. Most are about older men confronting major changes in their lives, looking into themselves and evaluating what those changes mean to them. Many stories veer toward the tragic but always end on a positive note. These guys come through!

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent short stories. The prose is so lucid and straightforward it's almost stark and yet there is a lyrical element as well. Each piece draws you into its characters, its story, its setting, and its mood ... Even though they are all quite short. There is a sense of delicate nuance, of the most important part being that which is not said. The respect for nature and the Midwestern context permeates the whole. At the end of each story, there is a slight sense of nostalgia for what has occurred at the same time as a subtle notion that all has not been completed ... But the endings aren't unsatisfying the way some short stories not so well done can be. This is a mature writer in control of the form he has chosen to use. Reminds me of early Richard Ford stories in Rock Springs.

[Amelia Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book won me over at the very last second. Since I'm from southeast Michigan, it was kind of cool to read stories about places I'm familiar with that never get mentioned, but otherwise the individual stories are starkly written and incredibly repetitive. They are cold portraits of mundane and fairly unpleasant moments in average people's lives, and despite a vague sense of depth I did not find them particularly profound. It's like reading a book entirely about mid-February forests under battleship grey clouds.

And yet, somehow, the last story tied them all together and I felt like I suddenly understood. I'm still not entirely clear on why it struck me so much - maybe it was the repetition, maybe it had nothing to do with the rest of the book - but I think it was worth the read.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of well written stories that calls, "go north." Lystra writes Michigan in all of its hard reality. Many of the stories speak of aging and traversing a life, learning that we could have made it different, but not sure if we would have even given the chance.

[Marge · Rating 4 out of 5]

The short stories are a very well written and leave you wanting more. All are somber, dark and sad. Actually a number of the stories could be continued as interesting books.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

good collection of short stories -- each ending as short stories seem to do with an ironic twist. Michigan author

[Dianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of short stories