Ate it Anyway

This book of short stories appealed to me primarily because the title involved eating, and the cover featured a photograph of fried eggs strung up on a clothesline. Alas, that was about the high point of the book. I just couldn’t get into these short stories, although I tried. I would listlessly pick the book up, read part of one, get bored, skip ahead, try another, bounce back, and so forth.

I’m not quite sure what it was that I didn’t like. The stories felt a little too self-conscious and forced to me, in a way which made them really inaccessible. They were also a bit repetitive, with the lines between characters and stories blurring for me.

In the reviews, the author is described as offbeat and quirky, which is something I usually like in an author, but Ate it Anyway just wasn’t my kind of quirk, apparently. A real disappointment from a Flannery O’Connor Award Winner.

Demographics:

Ate it Anyway, by Ed Allen. Published 2003, 182 pages. Fiction.

Good Faith

Another Jane Smiley, and this one is about the real estate craze of the 1980s, and the people who got caught up in it. Smiley has a way of capturing people and places which is really intriguing and somehow very vivid; her characters almost remind me of Picasso sketches, loosely described in brief, bold strokes which somehow come together to create a very distinctive and recognizable person. I also like that her characters are all deeply flawed and often unlikable, much like most of humanity.

As I read the book, I could feel the inevitable, slow buildup towards the conclusion, and I was filled with a sense of pity for the leading character, as well as a smug “how stupid can you be” attitude as I watched him make fundamental and really silly mistakes. Yet, I kept reading, because I wanted to know how soon he would realize what was happening, and how, precisely, his mistakes would come back to bite him.

Good Faith looked at the lust for money and property which fills many of us, along with the nature of love, belonging, and outsiders. It reminded me, in a sense, of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I think I sort of loved it.

Demographics:

Good Faith, by Jane Smiley. Published 2003, 417 pages. Fiction.