Lesley Dormen’s Favorite Linked Stories

When I first obtained a copy of Lesley Dormen’s collection of linked short stories, The Best Place to Be, I realized that although I’ve been inviting short story writers to pay tribute to their own favorite authors for a while now, I’d never addressed this particular branch of the genre. Well, I thought, here’s a great place to start—and Lesley had plenty of ideas on how to do it!

I’d been reading and loving “linked story” collections long before I wrote one myself—in fact, long before the thing itself (novel? story collection?) had even been named. Like other readers of a certain age, I discovered John Updike’s sophisticated, neurotic, ambivalent Everycouple, Joan and Richard Maple, in the early 1970s, in The New Yorker. Updike had been writing stories about the Maples since 1956; eventually, all thirteen were collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. These exquisite explorations of young marriage (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”), middle marriage (“Giving Blood”), broken marriage (“Twin Beds in Rome”) and divorce (“Separating”) were thrilling to come upon one at a time. Collected in one volume, the Maples stories are collected glimpses of 1960s marriage, allowing a reader to drop in and out of one couple’s intimate life through their experiences of parenthood, infidelity, and divorce, while preserving a unique time and place, all refracted through that Updikean narrative dazzle.

The extraordinary first sentence of “Twin Beds in Rome” is carved into my brain, probably forever: “The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come.” I see myself in my tiny apartment on West Eleventh Street (one block away from where the Maples themselves once lived!), puffing at a cigarette and pecking away at my Smith-Corona, trying to replicate the amazing confidence, rhythm, psychological complexity and surprise of that one sentence. These were the first stories that captured my heart as a young female reader new to New York City, to Greenwich Village, to her own life. They were the first stories that taught me to read as a writer.

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15 April 2007 | selling shorts |

Anthony Varallo’s “Reunion” with Cheever

Anthony Varallo won the Iowa Short Fiction prize last year for his short story collection, This Day in History, and was also a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Fiction Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston, and serves as fiction editor for the school’s literary journal, Crazyhorse.

My favorite short stories have several things in common: They all stand just to the left or right of a more anthologized one (my favorite Carver is “Why Don’t You Dance?” not “Cathedral,” my favorite Updike is “The Happiest I’ve Been” not “A&P,” and so on); they are stories I’ve read so many times the collections they inhabit open naturally to their first page (my Complete Short Stories of Bernard Malamud will open to “The Silver Crown” if you hold its spine in your open palm and allow the pages to part); and they are all stories I’d wished I’d written myself—desperately wished, even reading them aloud to my living room, imagining this was so.

John Cheever’s “Reunion” is one of them. The story, one of his shortest, appears in The Stories of John Cheever, a book so important to me that I sometimes scan people’s shelves looking for it, its presence in a strange house making me feel immediately at home. Do you know “Reunion”? I want to ask, but never do. The one about the kid meeting his father for the first time in years, the father taking him on a drunken, whirlwind tour of New York, insulting waiters, newspaper vendors along the way, the narrator gamely going along, wishing to know his unknowable father before he departs for his train?

The story is a minor miracle, clocking in at less than 1,500 words or so. In the opening paragraph, Charlie, the narrator, meets his father at Grand Central Station, feeling that their “reunion” might offer a glimpse of his own future. He hugs his father, wishing someone would photograph them together. His father, drunk, we soon discover—and this is one the main pleasures of the story, how quickly Charlie’s illusions fall, yet the story speeds ahead anyway—takes Charlie to a series of nightclubs, harassing the waiters, until asked to leave. His father speaks poor Italian in an Italian restaurant, affects a British accent in a club where the waiters “wore pink jackets like hunting coats” and insists on leaving when a waiter asks to see Charlie’s ID.

Charlie observes all of this, without comment, occasionally consoling his father by calling him “Daddy.” The word sticks out on the page: Charlie is a teenager. We feel Charlie’s embarrassment, but something else, too: his unwillingness to condemn his father’s behavior. Instead, Charlie watches, wondering, we feel, whether his father will be his “future and doom,” as Charlie wondered in the opening paragraph. Daddy, he wishes to call him, restoring a parent-child order that we know never existed and yet we, like Charlie, yearn for it nonetheless.

The story ends with Charlie telling his father he has to go; he has a train to catch. Charlie’s father tells him he’ll buy him a newspaper to read on the train—then begins hurling insults at the newspaper vendor. “Goodbye, Daddy,” Charlie says, boarding the train, leaving the reader with one of the greatest, impossible, you’d-ruin-it-if-you-tried-it yourself endings in all of American short fiction; a story that ends with the same seven words that opened it. And that was the last time I saw my father.

12 September 2006 | selling shorts |