Stories offer memorable characters, domestic drama
Some short-story writers — George Saunders, say, or Kelly Link — play with the genre’s form and push the boundaries of what a story can be. Others adhere to traditional narrative structures and call to mind Arnold Schoenberg’s famous comment, “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.”
Eric Puchner, author of the story collection “Music Through the Floor” and the novel “Model Home,” is a more traditional author. His works are conventional by contemporary standards, but they are nonetheless memorable portraits of suburban angst. He is an old-fashioned major-scale composer, but, in the hands of a skilled artist, even a familiar tune can seem fresh and surprising
Most of the stories in his new collection, “Last Day on Earth,” are domestic dramas. Puchner has two sets of protagonists: teenagers caught in the vortex of their divorced or separated parents’ complicated lives, and men and women in their mid-30s who are dealing with the repercussions of past mistakes. One can easily imagine some of the teens in this book growing up to be the tortured adults of the latter stories.
Consider Errol, the protagonist of “Brood X.” During his 12th summer, he and his family speculate about their new neighbors, a family that includes a son who is convinced of the existence of a “parallel universe” in which what is wrong in our own lives is suddenly right. In this multiverse, the girl Errol would like to date would be more open to his advances.
It’s not hard to imagine Errol or his friend growing up to be Kevin, the 34-year-old art teacher in “Heavenland.” Kevin’s ex-girlfriend calls him one day to watch Arrow, their baby son. When his artist pal Druvi, “the last of Kevin’s heterosexual friends to resist fatherhood,” invites him to a party where pot and cocaine will be plentiful, Kevin brings Arrow along, perhaps hoping to enter a multiverse in which a baby would be safe in such surroundings.
That’s the pattern of the stories in “Last Day on Earth”: characters making self-defeating decisions and dealing with the consequences. In “Mothership,” a 35-year-old woman who recently tried to kill herself helps out when her older sister’s husband requires treatment for a brain tumor and inadvertently discovers an inconvenient secret her sister has been keeping. And in “Expression,” the parents of a 15-year-old Californian who dreams of becoming a writer send him to a camp for artists in Massachusetts, where he encounters a troubled roommate, the roommate’s ill sister and a mystery person known as the “Dorm Room Prowler,” who is stealing the students’ property.
In the title story, an 8-year-old boy tries to prevent his divorced mother from ditching the family’s two German shorthaired pointers, his father’s prized pets. But the bookstore clerk in “Independence” exacts an even more original form of revenge. When a customer he helped find books orders the book online on his phone in front of him, the clerk staples a flyer for a Jamaica Kincaid talk to the customer’s chest.
Two of the stories veer away from domestic drama and enter the realm of science fiction. The 12-yearold protagonist of “Right This Instant” has started to suspect that his divorced mother is a robot. And in “Beautiful Monsters,” two Perennials, a parentless brother and sister who have lived for 30 years but whose aging has been stunted, meet a Senescent, an adult male who lives in the nearby mountains. The man’s presence makes the girl, who works in a lab “where embryos are grown,” wonder what it would be like to have a baby inside her.
These two stories tiptoe to the edge of sci-fi, but, even here, Puchner’s achievement is not the invention of unique new worlds but a unique take on themes of family and belonging.
Perhaps the story that best encapsulates the message of this book is “Trojan Whores Hate You Back,” in which a group of ’80s punk rockers who have seen better days — one has bursitis so intense he can barely lift his arms, another requires a hemorrhoid pillow — tries to stage a reunion tour.
One of the band members mentions the final track on the vinyl-format version of Sonic Youth’s “EVOL.” The track is marked with an infinity sign, and the album has a locked groove that prevents the song from ending. Like the aging rockers in this story, many of the protagonists in Puchner’s well-crafted stories come to terms with the fact that life isn’t like that final Sonic Youth track. Life ends, and, as one member tells another, choices have consequences. The challenge is to make plenty of good music before the stylus reaches its terminus and the turntable comes to rest.
Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Miami Herald.