God Bless America: Stories [Paperback]

I've been a big fan of Almond's since his first story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, which I re-read several times, and I've followed his career through all the subsequent story collections, books of essays, and the novel he co-wrote with Julianna Baggott. Through it all, Almond never disappoints. His language is always so simultaneously inventive and precise, plumbing the depths of characters whose weaknesses and worst instincts are all too familiar. Steve's also got a strong iconoclastic/provocateur streak so he takes you to places some writers might not dare to go, as he holds up a mirror to sides of ourselves we might not always be the most proud of. God Bless America is another great collection, displaying his exceptional talent. The 13 stories in the collection are:

1. God Bless America - 15 pp - A very funny story in the rich vein of marvelously self-deluded protagonists. A young man who works as a stock boy in a drugstore accidentally takes an acting class at an adult education center. With no talent but a new passion for the dramatic arts and with dreams of becoming a major star, he takes a job as a tour guide for Duck-boat-like company in Boston. The shady North End characters who run that operation get him unwittingly involved in some high crimes, and with serendipitous luck he manages to have his own little share of the American dream come true.

2. Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched - 22 pp - A great story, chosen for the 2010 Best American Short Stories collection. Steve, I think, is the son of analysts, so he has a lot of fun tweaking the profession. He wrote another very funny story about an analyst who likes to parade around naked in his office after hours. In this piece, an analyst treats a professional poker player with a perfect name - Gary Sharpe. The player comes to him and after he whines about a bad loss and his fears that he has a tell, the analyst think he's discovered what it is. After a year's worth of sessions in which the player railed against him, the analyst thinks he might have a chance to exact his own little revenge when he meets the player at a casino and they take each other on in a game of Texas hold `em.

3. Hope Wood - 15 pp - Two unemployed philosophy graduates try to earn some money by helping an old black man who paints pictures on discarded furniture. One of them desperately hopes a crib the old man won't give him might convince his pregnant girlfriend to take him back.

4. Not Until You Say Yes- 16 pp - An older widow who works security at Logan airport has to babysit a boy who keeps trying to keep to get bumped off overbooked flights in order to cash in on the vouchers he can accumulate for the inconvenience.

5. Shotgun Wedding - 17 pp - A woman who works for an ad agency discovers she may be pregnant, and while she resists taking a doctor's office or home test to get confirmation, she considers the implications her condition might have on her relationship with her ambitious fiancé.

6. Tamalpais - 15 pp - A young waiter's coming of age. While a young man in a restaurant is trying to prove himself, his first customer is a desperate older woman who eats and drinks by herself, announcing that an important man is going to come in any second and throw a lavish party for her. By the end of the night, the young man has to try to avoid the clutches of the very drunk and still very alone woman.

7. What the Bird Says - 16 pp - An absolutely marvelous story about a son who moved away from his affluent Southern home and refused to run the family business. But when his always critical father is on his deathbed the son is called home. In morphine-induced hallucinations, the father carries on conversations with a bird he sees on his shoulder, offering brutally honest assessments of each member of his family. Sitting by his side, listening to all of his father's rambling thoughts, the son manages to find a powerful reconciliation with his father.

8. The Darkness Together - 14 pp - A Pushcart-prize winner about a mother and son forced to share a train cabin with a boorish passenger who forces them to face some unwelcome truths about the perhaps too close relationship the attractive widowed woman has forged with her handsome 18-year-old son..

9. A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve - 16 pp - A college student spends Christmas with his rich girlfriend at her family mansion, hoping he'll get his long-sought-after chance to have sex with her, but he witnesses some bizarre goings-on worthy of a Fellini movie.

10. Akedah - 6 pp - A heart-wrenching story about a widow who has to deal with the violent streak her son possesses after returning home from World War II. Following doctors' orders, she takes the misguided route some took in the 1950s for dealing with mental illness.

11. Hagar's Sons - 20 pp - A Wall Street securities specialist gets flown to an Arab kingdom for a meeting with a sheik in the summer of 2001. He's treated lavishly but kept in the dark about the purpose of the trip until he discovers the sheik is looking for an insider's tip on how to invest in the aftermath of an attack on the United States.

12. First Date Back - 17 pp -- A blow-your-socks off story about a soldier unprepared for re-entry to civilization who develops a crush on a stewardess on his flight back from Iraq. Her attempt to be kind to him has devastating consequences.

13. A Dream of Sleep - 17 pp - A moving tale of a caretaker for a cemetery who watches the world change around him. He retreats within the enclosed space, living there and caring for it, long after all the relatives of the dead who came to visit the graves have died themselves and been buried in more modern cemeteries. His only connection to another person, after years of isolation, comes when he stumbles upon a young girl who snuck into the abandoned cemetery to have sex with her boyfriend.

Steve Almond creates realistic characters, young and old, dealing with their own demons, flaws, and the pressures of American life. I laughed at times and nearly cried at others. Almond's wit and gift for storytelling made this collection one of the most enjoyable I've read.

My favorite story, mostly because I love to play, read about, and write about poker, was "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched." Forgetting all of the clever idiosyncrasies on display in each of the two main characters, a psychoanalyst irresistibly drawn to the poker tables to combat his secretly depressive personality and his swashbuckling professional poker playing patient, Almond's portrayal of the poker action itself in the climactic final scene propelled this story into a special place within my personal poker-related canon.

Writing is said to be a decision making process, always considering the next word, and when writing about the progression of a fictional poker hand, that decision making process is compounded by many potential choices regarding cards, odds, player psychology, etc., and Almond's description, what he chose to include and what he left up to the reader, captivated and enthralled. I admire his focus on the players' psyche and conversation, adequate but not overwhelming attention given to the cards themselves, and the overall flow of the game's action. As the Dr. and patient square off at the table during the final sequence, Almond begins from the Dr.'s perspective and I never saw the end coming, kicking myself in retrospect for not being a more astute prognosticator. In my defense, I was gobbling up the words so quickly, so eager to learn the result of the game and story, that I didn't try very hard to predict any outcome other than the one that seemed to be on its way. Almond bluffed me and I loved every minute.

The only story I didn't love was "First Date Back," not because of the utter sadness it invokes, but because I couldn't quite believe that the date itself would've happened the way it does.

I laughed out loud at the ridiculousness played out by the characters in "A Jew Berserk On Christmas Eve."

"A Dream Of Sleep," a chilling, sad tale, forced me, regardless of my strong belief of the possibilities alive today in small business capitalism, to think about capitalism's propensity for coldness, its inconsiderate nature, the ways in which it can destroy lives.

I'll be on the lookout for articles published by Steve Almond around the web (I read one this week on The Rumpus), and new fiction from him as well.

Like most fiction I enjoy, Steve Almond's fluid, distinctive style led me to read the stories once for pleasure and again to see if I could figure out "how they worked." My second reading usually includes as much pleasure as the first.

The best fiction presents a quality most easily defined as magic. All good fiction requires mastery, training, and rigorous practice. But beguilement occurs (I believe this like religion) when readers are compelled to participate. The writing demands the reader's perspective, his or her opinions, and experiences. Fine fiction arouses memories or thoughts and feelings powerful enough to imbue stories with recurring spirit. At the same time, the receptive reader develops a new and intimate awareness. That's my definition of art. (I cannot consider my own fiction finished or even promising without readers.) A fanciful, even mystical theory, but other readers and writers share my standard or else I've misread several essays.

Either way, the fourteen fictional pieces in Steve Almond's "God Bless America: Stories" offer you that chance of enthrallment. They progress from hilarious ("God Bless America" and "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched"); to funny but sad ("Not Until You Say Yes" and "Shotgun Wedding"); then sad but funny ("Tamalpais" and "What the Bird Says.") I've settled on poignant for "The Darkness Together." Following these are: the sick-sad-funny ("A Jew Berserk On Christmas Eve"); the tragic ("Akedah"); creepy-political ("Hagar's Sons"); tragic-political ("First Date Back"); and finally a man's hard life climaxing in horror that may or may not offer redemption ("A Dream of Sleep".) God Bless America: Stories