The Stories of Richard Bausch

Rating:
Summary: Stories of the outsider
Review: No doubt about it, Richard Bausch can write a piquant short story. In the preface, he comments that while you'd think that novel writing and short story writing could be similar activities, the short story has a life and rhythm all its own, while the novel requires months or years of polishing and extension. So here are short stories that seem to relate to one another thematically.

The stories are uniformly about "the outsider" or the guy who just doesn't fit in. His parents may be mildly eccentric, he may have married badly, or be living in the wrong place, say, Montana. How he got there was a throw of the dice or by letting life slap him around aimlessly. In "Glass Meadow", the story is told by a man whose parents, ever on the run from creditors and disasters, are cheerfully taking them to "vacation" in a wooded cabin, which is their way of telling the kids they're taking up residence in a place where they can't be served with papers or evicted for lack of rent. Another story tells of a man who meets the girlfriend of his brother, a woman who is not only ugly, but a stone-cold liar. He has his own troubles with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The end of the story is absolutely hysterical, and absolutely logical. I must have laughed for a solid minute.

In a way, these stories remind me of the hapless folk in Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" but there is something darker and more hopeless here. The only flaw of the collection is the lack of variance; every story, though well-written, is on the same theme. As a thick volume, it should perhaps be savored quite slowly, whenever one has a taste for something dark.

Rating:
Summary: A treat for short story readers!
Review: Richard Bausch has always been better known for his short fiction than for his novels, and this hefty compilation of his stories demonstrates why. Bausch is a master at showing vulnerable moments, the points at which marriages, familial relationships, and psyches break down. He condenses entire lives into a few telling scenes. The awkwardness with which his protagonists approach relationships makes them endearingly fallible, with their missteps costing them in ways they never anticipate. Bausch is so skilled at evoking the reality of interpersonal encounters that one always gets the feeling that these solidly believable characters survive beyond the last line of their individual tales.

These forty-two stories are not meant to be read as a marathon, for to do so would be overwhelming. The recurrent motifs of personal blunders, regrets, and foundering relationships can wear on a reader if taken all at once. This collection is best read in chunks separated by other works - a novel, maybe, or stories by other authors. With this kind of space between readings, almost every story is a gem. "Nobody in Hollywood" tells of the ruined loves of two brothers and the ironic twist that unites them. "Someone to Watch Over Me" details what is perhaps the final night of a marriage, at an outrageously expensive restaurant that reveals the unbridgeable rift between Ted and Marlee. "Ancient History" subtly exposes the depth of emotion a teenage boy feels as he, his mother, and his aunt celebrate their first Christmas without his father. "Contrition" tells of the obsession an ex-con has with an old photograph of his father and the idyllic moment it captured. In one of the rare stories from a female point-of-view, "Guatemala," Bausch excels at exposing the raw undercurrents that run in a family of women. Bausch is at his best when he delves deeply into family dynamics, especially between protagonists and their parents.

This collection is truly a treat for Bausch fans. It makes a great gift for readers of contemporary literature.

Rating:
Summary: A treat for short story readers!
Review: Richard Bausch has always been better known for his short fiction than for his novels, and this hefty compilation of his stories demonstrates why. Bausch is a master at showing vulnerable moments, the points at which marriages, familial relationships, and psyches break down. He condenses entire lives into a few telling scenes. The awkwardness with which his protagonists approach relationships makes them endearingly fallible, with their missteps costing them in ways they never anticipate. Bausch is so skilled at evoking the reality of interpersonal encounters that one always gets the feeling that these solidly believable characters survive beyond the last line of their individual tales.

These forty-two stories are not meant to be read as a marathon, for to do so would be overwhelming. The recurrent motifs of personal blunders, regrets, and foundering relationships can wear on a reader if taken all at once. This collection is best read in chunks separated by other works - a novel, maybe, or stories by other authors. With this kind of space between readings, almost every story is a gem. "Nobody in Hollywood" tells of the ruined loves of two brothers and the ironic twist that unites them. "Someone to Watch Over Me" details what is perhaps the final night of a marriage, at an outrageously expensive restaurant that reveals the unbridgeable rift between Ted and Marlee. "Ancient History" subtly exposes the depth of emotion a teenage boy feels as he, his mother, and his aunt celebrate their first Christmas without his father. "Contrition" tells of the obsession an ex-con has with an old photograph of his father and the idyllic moment it captured. In one of the rare stories from a female point-of-view, "Guatemala," Bausch excels at exposing the raw undercurrents that run in a family of women. Bausch is at his best when he delves deeply into family dynamics, especially between protagonists and their parents.

This collection is truly a treat for Bausch fans. It makes a great gift for readers of contemporary literature.

Rating:
Summary: Pain Soup
Review: Say your goal is to locate a short story writer in relation to his peers. Start by imagining a map of a valley, with Mount Munro at one end and Mount Carver at the other. Mount Munro, after Alice, is the summit of capacious stories that range widely across time and space, containing fully laid out lives. Inner worlds are slowly peeled back and the reader is led, subtly and inexorably, to a shiver of revelation. At the other extreme, Raymond Carver's brief stories seem found rather than made. The insights come all at once and hit you so fast you feel defenseless, then dazed. The impact lingers long after you've put down the story.

The Stories of Richard Bausch lie in the Carver end of the valley, somewhere fairly high up on the flanks of Mount Carver. The guy can write, and, like Carver, he can crack open whole worlds in a few pages. Each story read separately is a gem. Read them in a batch, though, and you may feel that you're stuck in the same bleak place. Bausch writes mostly about men whose lives are spinning out of control. These men seem to lack the something - courage, self-awareness, time, money or energy - they need to step off the entropy express. Individually, the lives are poignant; collectively they're depressing.

Which isn't to say there aren't small masterpieces here. Like Valor, about a drunk who saves a busload of kids only to come home and find his wife is leaving him. Or Glass Meadow, a marvelous depiction of what it feels like to be a twelve year old boy, wrapped in a story that's funny and sad and tender and true. Or The Person I Have Mostly Become, about the futility of good intentions, one of the saddest stories you'll ever read. In addition to men, Bausch crafts the emotional worlds of young boys, perhaps an underserved population in current fiction, with a jeweler's precision.

What gives these stories their power is, paradoxically, what is also unsatisfying about them: the absence of the implied author. The implied author is the shaping force that sits between the people on the page and the actual person who writes the story. The implied author presents a stance toward the work, which helps the reader to shape their own response. The implied author Alice Munro says to us, "We're going to look at some painful things, but we're going to go about it with dignity and fortitude, and no matter how sad or trapped these people are, neither we nor they will miss the grace notes or succumb to despair." The implied Raymond Carver is a Bogart-like figure, who says, "This is what life is like, my friend, funny and sad all at once, and we have no choice but to stay on stage and play out our part. Let's lift a glass for all the acts of fecklessness and false bravado, toast those ineffectual fists raised against fate."

I can't find the implied Richard Bausch, and I can't figure out how he feels about all this despair he's serving up. He seems to be saying, "Here's a bowl of pain soup. I'll step aside and let you eat it. When you're done with this one, I'll serve you another."

How you respond to this collection depends upon how many bowls of pain soup you can stand to eat in one sitting.

Rating:
Summary: Pain Soup
Review: Say your goal is to locate a short story writer in relation to his peers. Start by imagining a map of a valley, with Mount Munro at one end and Mount Carver at the other. Mount Munro, after Alice, is the summit of capacious stories that range widely across time and space, containing fully laid out lives. Inner worlds are slowly peeled back and the reader is led, subtly and inexorably, to a shiver of revelation. At the other extreme, Raymond Carver's brief stories seem found rather than made. The insights come all at once and hit you so fast you feel defenseless, then dazed. The impact lingers long after you've put down the story.

The Stories of Richard Bausch lie in the Carver end of the valley, somewhere fairly high up on the flanks of Mount Carver. The guy can write, and, like Carver, he can crack open whole worlds in a few pages. Each story read separately is a gem. Read them in a batch, though, and you may feel that you're stuck in the same bleak place. Bausch writes mostly about men whose lives are spinning out of control. These men seem to lack the something - courage, self-awareness, time, money or energy - they need to step off the entropy express. Individually, the lives are poignant; collectively they're depressing.

Which isn't to say there aren't small masterpieces here. Like Valor, about a drunk who saves a busload of kids only to come home and find his wife is leaving him. Or Glass Meadow, a marvelous depiction of what it feels like to be a twelve year old boy, wrapped in a story that's funny and sad and tender and true. Or The Person I Have Mostly Become, about the futility of good intentions, one of the saddest stories you'll ever read. In addition to men, Bausch crafts the emotional worlds of young boys, perhaps an underserved population in current fiction, with a jeweler's precision.

What gives these stories their power is, paradoxically, what is also unsatisfying about them: the absence of the implied author. The implied author is the shaping force that sits between the people on the page and the actual person who writes the story. The implied author presents a stance toward the work, which helps the reader to shape their own response. The implied author Alice Munro says to us, "We're going to look at some painful things, but we're going to go about it with dignity and fortitude, and no matter how sad or trapped these people are, neither we nor they will miss the grace notes or succumb to despair." The implied Raymond Carver is a Bogart-like figure, who says, "This is what life is like, my friend, funny and sad all at once, and we have no choice but to stay on stage and play out our part. Let's lift a glass for all the acts of fecklessness and false bravado, toast those ineffectual fists raised against fate."

I can't find the implied Richard Bausch, and I can't figure out how he feels about all this despair he's serving up. He seems to be saying, "Here's a bowl of pain soup. I'll step aside and let you eat it. When you're done with this one, I'll serve you another."

How you respond to this collection depends upon how many bowls of pain soup you can stand to eat in one sitting.