Immerse In Typical: Stories Executed By Padgett Powell Delivered In Digital Edition

fits nicely into the fraternity of Donald Barthelme and George Saunders, in that reading a short story by any one of this lot makes you have to redefine what exactly makes for a short story in the first place.
With Powell, a story can become an exploration of a word like irony, winnowing or desultory, or an absurdist train of logic that erupts from an accidental beheading or free world tour tickets sitting between the pages of a magazine.
Absolutely primo stories here are the title piece, "Wait," and "The Winnowing of Mrs, Schuping. " And the ear, the ear! Powell can make sentences throb with spirit, This collection of short stories made me realize that I already know all stories and the fact that there are a lot of them written and still being written is because stories now all differ only by the way they are being presented, like there are a lot of ways rice can be cooked, rice with garlic, rice with fish, fried, boiled, paella, noodled, etc.
The carrier piece here, Typical, is what assaults your brain when you start reading and it is nothing but the same stuff Kafka would have written, I mean ideawise, though much more modern and much more difficult.
It is like rice mixed with pebbles, if ever there is such a dish somewhere in China, so it is difficult to swallow and digest although the story is as old as the hills.
What I mean is, why have rice with pebbles when rice can be pure or mixed with other edible stuff and can be enjoyed without difficulty

This is therefore different, but not much.
Forgettable, and quite certainly. I was hoping for writing along the lines of You amp Me and The Interrogative MoodpredemiseA few bits of filler which have the courtesy to be very short do not mar an otherwise accomplished collection.
Powell's colorful, inimitable phrasing is here in full force,

Highlights: "Typical," "The Modern Italian," "Wayne's Fate," "Texas," "Proposition," "The Winnowing of Mrs, Schuping" Willie Stargell, prodigious hitter of home runs and occasional philosopher, once considered that every baseball game begins with the home plate umpire reaching an arm over the shoulder of a squatting catcher, pointing toward the pitcher, and ordering, in a melodic voice, "PLAAAAAAAAY BALL!" "He doesn't say, 'Work Ball'," Stargell smiled.


Reading Padgett Powell, I am reminded that there is wordplay, but no wordwork,

Twentythree short stories, some long and some very short, just two or three pages, Some bizarre, but not bizarro, Some tending to magic realism, But all make the reader pause from time to time at the fun of putting words together, even if sometimes they originate in the darkest corners of the mind.
These guys:



Try this, from 'Mr, Nefarious':

Mr, Nefarious smiled, and only when smiling was he able to do anything else, When smiling he could also do nothing, but when not smiling he could do nothing but not smile,

Or how about one sentence, this from 'Wait':

Spavined, clavicular, and cowhocked, with an air not of malice but simply of a leaden determination that seemed to come up from the hard, baking ground itself on which it stood, chained, confined, gravitate to the orbit of earth depressed, moonlike, and polished by its fivefoot circular diurnal traveling, looking forward with a lowlidded not scowl or glare but just look, the eyes halflidded and halfrolled, suggesting not insolence or calculation or even sentience but a kind of priderearaxled and logchained for a lifetime to a hot powdery hole in which it is its fate to consider its chances of fighting, the rare times not chained, for its very lifea profound selfesteem that says simply, I am here, you see that I am here, what need to look you in the eye: the bulldog bit the corncob truncate.


'Mr. Irony' is a Tim Burtonlike character in his eponymous story, but then he renounces irony in the very next story, aptly not ironically named 'Mr, Irony Renounces Irony'. Having given up Irony, Mr, Irony goes to the unemployment office, He's denied benefits because he had had no employer, had not been laid off or fired, What was more ironic than getting paid for not working only if you could prove someone had deemed you unsuitable for working

Powell, when not being ironical, can also serve up truisms.


From 'Proposition':

You can't ramble around the woods in your truck going to fish camp without drinking,

And from 'Texas':

If a boy is afraid of the dark and wets the bed, try hard, very hard, not to comment in any language.
He will grow to put you softly in your grave,

In one of the weirder stories, 'The Modern Italian', which I recommend you read last, Mario Moscalini, a cabdriver, picks up a very fat Frenchman:

Mario had no idea how to contend with a large Frenchman who did not care if you insulted Jerry Lewis.
The idea even frightened him a little, One might as well be dealing with

a Moroccan, or worse, A Frenchman unprepared to defend Jerry Lewis might do anything at all, because he would be a man who was empty inside, perhaps not even a man in the normal sense but a kind of alienan antihomme, as he thought the French might put it.


I could go on and on, But I will end with my favorite story: 'Labove and Son', Labove, see, was a teacher somewhere else, where he inappropriately 'touched' the Varnier girl, For all of five seconds, She was thirteen. He fled to El Campo, Texas, married and had 'son', When son was in high school, he learns about what his father did, reading about it in a book of all things, He sorta asks his Dad about it in the context of telling his Dad he wants to change his name to Bob Love II, The dad, Labove, likes to sit on a flat chair, tilted back, with the front two legs exactly two inches off the floor, He let the chair settle down to all fours, then tilted back again, a rare full three inches off the ground, And when he finally speaks, in one of those defining fatherson moments, he says this: What she was like, I need Italian to tell you, Change your name.




By the way, has anyone else considered that magic realism is an oxymoron, Dr. Phil, I think, has just published his fourth DIET book, Setting aside the fact that you should be able to say everything about dieting in your first volume, why WHY, WHY, WHY I ask are these books not in the Magic Realism section of the library

You mean you haven't

Try it.
Highly recommended. Glorious. I was introduced to PP as no one affectionately calls him by wikipedia as an influence on Ben Marcus, I can see it, the highwire juggling act of absurd humor, suffocating dread, and improbable somersaults of literary selfconsciousness amid acrobatically death defying prose, The back blurbed pedigree correctly includes Elkin, Barthelme, and Barry Hannah, Can't go wrong, can't wait for more, I enjoyed so many of the stories in this book, but it deservessimply for The Modern Italian, I could read that over and over I wanted to enjoy this, but kept getting about halfway through each story and skipping to the next hoping that one would finally come together in a way that I didn't hate reading.
the first section dragged a bunch after the title story which is also the first story, and the second section although fantastic left me wondering if maybe powell was just about being a much more southern barthelme, but then ladies and gentlemen, we hit the third section.
good lord does my heart beat faster and harder and with more grace that i thought it could just by thinking about the end of this book,

it comes off at times as someone who obviously learned a lot from barthelme, there are moments where you worry it will take only the tools and tricks and none of the emotional heft at the core of don b's work,

but it's good, it is. it is really really good, our fears and doubts are simply fears and doubts, and what is a world without fears and doubts,stars. There arevery different to each other, original short stories, some are great and very thought provoking, others are bizarre,

My favourite stories include Typical, Dr, Ordinary, The Modern Italian, Mr and Mrs Eliot and Cleveland and The Winnowing of Mrs Schuping,

This book was first published in, Collection of short stories, published in, by the acclaimed author of Edisto and A Woman Named Drown, Profoundly disappointing. While the first story was sort of ok, afterward it started looking like some helplessly untalented students' writing assignments, Utter dreck, incomprehensibly bad. The occasional aphoristic wit was still disconnected from anything resembling coherence or thought, Gave upthrough.

Consider this example and tell me how did this not win any pretentiouslybadwriting awards:

“An excellent wool blazer contravenes the wit of planned obsolescence to the utmost.
An excellent wool blazer nearly obviates, forever, the new wool blazer, Do you think my father had a goddamned thing to do with it I dont even think his father had a goddamned thing to do with it, The Wall Street Journal may well be an excellently written paper but I do not find it helpful, It is of marginal use to me, I dont care for it, I dont care to be buzzed, either, We can, if we want to, stem the tide of technological tackiness, we can have the girl just get up and knock and lean in, or present herself with dignity and inform you that someone wishes to speak with you on the string and Dixie cup.
What is so wrong with that Do you think Id stay here if my father had a goddamned thing to do with it Stay Remain Hold prideless untenable sinecure when of I sing ” An interesting, experimental, but ultimately directionless collection of short stories by the author of "Edisto.
" Most of the stories are set in the contemporary south, but rather than being character studies or perceptions of events, they are experiments in various prose techniques and devices, often involving no more than plays on words, as in "General Rancidity" or "Dr.
Ordinary. " Some of the stories, such as "Mr, Ordinary," are fun in their language but ultimately ineffective as stories, Among the best in the collection are "The Modern Italian," "Miss Resignation," and the final two stories, "Mr, amp Mrs. Elliot and Cleveland" and "The Winnowing of Mrs, Schuping. " Not nearly as engaging as "Edisto," but uniquely quirky in its best stories, In every cheesy horror or scifi movie involving aliens or demons or pod people, theres the almostobligatory scene where the heroine, having successfully slain the last of the evil critters, falls into the arms of his or her sidekick/romantic interest/significant other, only to come to the sickening realization that the person they are embracing has been taken over by the forces of darkness.
The music crescendos in ominous cacophony the camera zooms in as the horrifying realization dawns across the protagonists face,

As I read this collection of stories, the third book by Padgett Powell, I experienced that exact same sinking feeling, Heres an author whose first novel, “Edisto”, was one of the most enchanting books I had read in, the year it was published, So when I came across this collection in the secondhand book store, buying it seemed like a nobrainer, Caveat lector! As it says in those indigestible mutual fund prospectuses that clog my mailbox daily, “past success is no guarantee of future performance”,

In this case, the warning signals were loud and clear, Had I just taken the time to do a little skimming in the store, I would have surely seen the warning signs, “Stories” with titles like “Mr, Irony Renounces Irony”, “Dr. Ordinary”, “General Rancidity”, “Mr. Nefarious”, “Miss Resignation”. These sound like homework assignments from a graduate writing workshop in hell, and thats pretty much the way they read as well, Mr. Powell apparently thinks this kind of thing may be passed off as writing:

“Dr, Ordinary found solace in nothing, He found his shoes untied during surgery, He found his mother once, when she was in her sixties, naked in the bathtub calling for a fresh martini, He found bluebirds too far south, He found pies too sweet to eat, He found God with no difficulty, but locating his belief another matter, “

And so on, for a total of three wretched pages, and sixty repetitions of the phrase “He found, . ”. If this kind of thing strikes you as insufferable, you are unlikely to find “General Rancidity”, which is just more of the same with the verb run instead of the verb find, any better.


It gets worse, Four of the stories are named for states: Kansas, Texas, South Carolina and Florida, Here is the firstor so of Texas:

“I fell off the lightning rod, I entered the sweepstakes. I lost control. I became beautiful. I charmed a queen. I defied gravity. I moved mountains. I bowled. I wept, mourned, moped, and sped about town in a convertible, progressively irascing the gendarme until I was charged with exhibitionist speed, ”

My feelings about this toxic insult to the intelligence may be summed up as follows:

Dr, Giltinan found this book to be worthless dreck,

Or, if you prefer:

I wanted to vomit,
.