I was pleased when I read David Means’ Assorted Fire Events to discover a set of short stories which are just that – stories. Many contemporary short-story writers like to write stories which are more “episodes” rather than finished works in themselves . With no scene-setting or character development, they drop you into the middle of some traumatic or enigmatic event, leaving the reader to wonder, “what was all that about”.
But David Means writes beginnings, middles and ends. These are almost mini-novellas, complete in themselves, and to this reviewer at least, seem to be in the great tradition of American short-story writers whose notable members include F Scott Fitzgerald and Eudora Welty. This on the other hand may be its (ever so slight) weakness. I have a suspicion after having read the book, that I’d have felt happier if it had been written about 15 to 20 years ago: there is a slight absence of modernity about it, and some of the themes are more Revolutionary Road than American Beauty.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Richard Ford (in his book The Sportswriter) and his other books about the suburban male. In the story “What They Did”, a young American couple buy a new house on a sparse and bleak new estate, where the builders have concreted over a stream in the back garden and turfed over it. The young wife is pregnant with her first child, and when the pathetic cost-cutting which went into the work fails as it must, tragedy happens. David Means perfectly captures the spirit of the last twenty years, in which houses were thrown up by speculative builders whose concept of “quality” was based more on satisfying the share holders than providing products worth buying.
In “Coitus”, a man and his partner meander around their thoughts in a desultory way, capturing the routine of a couple who are keeping up appearances rather than indulging in an act of love. And in Railroad Incident, a victim of the boom and bust era in which we live, wanders around a desolate landscape until he is set upon by modern day savages whose jealousy of his credit cards and expensive clothes drive them to commit a terrible crime against him.
I think this books captures the landscape of middle America rather well. This is the place we see in American road movies. It is not a pretty place, and it is not uplifting, and frankly it is not somewhere I feel I want to visit. But for a book of short-stories which opens the reader’s eyes to another culture, its “good enough”, and its literary qualities are sufficiently strong to suggest that David Means is a writer to watch.
But having said that, I’m immediately struck with the thought, “No, he would have been someone to watch in the 1980s”. Even the cover shows a 1970s car. Its all a bit retrospective and would perhaps this would have been a five star review if the book had slightly less of the “hobos on boxcars” about it
