Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

By Lorrie Moore

I went in biased to this novel: I am a fan of Lorrie Moore. I've read a couple of her short stories and found those to be wonderfully hilarious. When I opened this book, I thought it would be like that, but it wasn't.

This is the story of Benoîte-Marie "Berie" Carr, a middle aged woman who is visiting Paris with her husband Daniel. Well it's kind of about that. It's also about Silsby "Sils" Chaucée, Berie's childhood friend. The book starts with "In Paris we eat brains every night," and it works from there until the narrator, Berie, has decided to remember her past, and what was. Berie and Sils work at an amusement park, and as the back of the book says, everything is good until Sils gets pregnant.

I'll start with my disappointments in this book. Lorrie Moore has a style of writing that can be too lofty at points. As much as love her jokes and witty remarks, she can also drag something from a sentence into a whole paragraph, sometimes more, and she has no reason to. It adds length to this very short novel, and without it will might only be a novella, but a novella would have worked.

With that said: I found this book to be silly where it needed to be, and sad when it needed to be. She had a way of making you sad, but at the same time you were smiling. Everything that happened happened because of Sils, and it always fell on Berie, but at the same time, they had a wonderful last summer together until Berie got caught. This book was the lost memory of childhood, the ability to do almost anything they wanted without really worrying about what adulthood was going to be like. Berie was reminiscing about the lost teenage years and wonders, "What happened?" If you like stories that can throw you around, you should really get a hold of this novel. Lorrie Moore has shown herself as one of the top contemporary writers.

4.5 stars

Next novel: The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

"Vast Hell"

by Guillermo Martínez
translated by Alberto Manguel

This is the first story from one of the major literary journals of the US, The New Yorker. Of course, they print a lot of their fiction online, which is the only place I get my fiction. They also only publish the most high quality stuff, supposedly, which was why I was disappointed when I read this story.

It's the story of a small town, a boy, and a French Woman they all suspect to be having an affair with the boy. No names are given. When the boy and French Woman disappear, the town suspects murder, but no. What really got to me about this story was the ending. So much develops and everything is well written until the end, which happens in only a couple sentences that left me wanting. I had many questions about what was going on, but this might be because I don't come from Argentina, where this takes place and was written.

Read the online material at The New Yorker. Their humor section is best, but you should give this story a shot, maybe I was wrong, and it all makes sense.

2 stars.

"Existentialism at the God Rodeo"

by Diana Goble

I picked this story only because of the name. It amused me, because how does one combine existentialism and a rodeo? Combining Exi. with God is easy, but a rodeo? Or a God Rodeo? This story is about a woman with a cheating husband, a son (who is exactly like her husband), and a daughter (who is the only one in her immediate family that she truly loves). It takes place in a day, starting with the morning vomit of blood, which turns into a fetal position on the floor of the bathroom.

The narration (I find it odd that most of what I do is first person) is depressing, but it fits the mood of the piece, and although it is a depressing story, you're not dragged through one sad thing after another because of Goble's dark humor that appears every once in awhile to break the sadness. Without that, I wouldn't have been abl to get to the end of the story. By the end of the story, I empathized with the narrator, and I was worried about her daughter, Annie. It was vague, but it wasn't, and it worked well in this short story.

Read it for yourself at Toasted Cheese

4 stars (I only read stories I like, is that a problem? Books are a different story, no pun intended)

"The Last Fairy Tale"

by Lynette Mejía

"The Last Fairy Tale" gives exactly what the title gives, but in a strange way. You won't find witches who want to eat German children, or a princess who has fallen into a deep slumber by an evil step-mother or queen. Instead, Mejía presents this fairy tale with an old woman giving a story about herself and the royal conflict she gets involved between two fairy princes.

The language in this story is magical in its own way, and as I read I felt I was reading a fairy tale, but I got more from it than a normal one. The images, and the plot are well developed, as well as the old woman. However, the fairies which played an important role weren't as developed as I had hoped. I was craving to understand the dynamic of a royal fairy household, but it was never given. The ending, though predictable, was a good finish to the story.

I would love to read more of Mejía's work, and The Absent Willow Review made a good decision.
You can read the story for yourself here.

3.5 stars

"Fiery Objects"

by Ethel Rohan

This is a flash fiction piece (under 1000 words) at The Dirty Napkin, an online literary magazine, and I hope the editors and author don't mind me writing about it.

Rohan takes a simple planetarium, and turns it into a metaphor that makes you think about things a little differently. At least it did for me. By the end I realized how things continue, and what we see in people, the scars, the lives, are really bringing out the past.

The only complaint I have is that I almost got the feeling the narrator was jumping off the balcony, which would create a sad ending, but I'm not sure. Maybe she doesn't, maybe she does. Read it yourself:

"Fiery Objects" by Ethel Rohan

A note: The Dirty Napkin is full of wonderful stories, not just this one. I've read a few there that have been excellent reads. If you like this one, and some of the other free ones online, you might consider subscribing, not to be advertising, but I feel I should take the time to talk about the site that's giving me stories.

4.5 stars

The Start and Jesus' Son

I'm starting up this blog, because I had to read a book for a class, and the Professor said it was a good book. It was not a great book, so I'm going to pass on my knowledge of this books to others. Every few weeks (when I finish book), I'll put up a review, that goes in depth about the book. It won't be something like "I hated this book, because Denis Johnson is stupid."

In between books I'll talk about short stories that are somewhere on the web out there, because people say the short story is dying, and I don't want it to. The short stories will be from well known magazines (like the New Yorker) to ones that might not even have a print version.

Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson

This book is extremely strange, and goes into a subject that not many authors are willing to deal with: drug addiction. The main character and narrator is Fuckhead, a man in what seems like his early twenties who has a problem with drugs and alcohol. The collection of short stories tell random events in his life that don't make much sense alone, though they were all published in big name Lit Mags before appearing in this collection.

The problem with this book lies in the fact that all of the stories are plotless. Denis Johnson is a great writer, but the lack of plot was not kind. The reader is left confused at the end of many of the stories, simply because (s)he was not sure what (s)he just read. In the worst story in the collection, "Out on Bail," the narrator jumps around between years without much of an explanation for the reader. This could be taken as a literary effect to show that the narrator was lost in time, but it only left me confused. To add to the confusion of this story, one of the characters, Jack Hotel, dies at the end, yet appears in the next story "Dundun." As I read the book I kept asking, "Where in his life am I?"

Getting past this odd form of experimental literature, I also couldn't like the main character, whose only name we get is F*ckhead. He seemed pretty much like a worthless person, who didn't care about life. He does drugs, he hates to work, because it "messes with his high," and I'm supposed to care that he's trying to change at the end? His change though, isn't something to congratulate F*ckhead on. His passions at the end of the book include having sex with cripples but not wanting to build an actual relationship, and becoming a voyeur for a Mennonite woman who lives by the busstop.

It was nice to see that the character joined AA and NA by the end of the book, but he didn't seem to care about going there. From his actions (his new addiction with Mennonites), I get more of the feeling that he's just pushing his addiction to something else, so he can get past the drugs/alcohol. It's like a smoker, trying to quit, but ends up gaining forty pounds because they started eating to feel the nicotine void. Will F*ckhead every become "normal" in the sense of a useful member of society? Denis Johnson leaves it ambiguous yet hopeful, but I don't think so.

2 stars.

Next Novel: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore