Last Night at the Lobster

Anyone ever having had a job suddenly yanked from under him by a questionable corporate decision will understand what Manny DeLeon is going through. Manny is one fine employee, a company man through and through who takes great pride in what he does for a living despite the low pay, the long hours, and the constant pressure from the home office to do more with less. Last Night at the Lobster may be Manny’s particular story but there are thousands and thousands of “Mannys” out there and Stewart O’Nan’s novel is a tribute to all of them.

Here it is, just five days before Christmas, and Manny is hoping for the perfect last day to close down the Red Lobster restaurant he’s managed for so long. He wants to go out with a bang: with a high customer count for the day, a heartfelt farewell to all his regulars and his crew, and a feeling of accomplishment despite the message of “failure” that the bean counters have tossed his way.

What he gets instead is a typical New England blizzard that requires him to crank up the old snow blower and hit the parking lot in an attempt to clear spaces for customers who are probably too smart to venture out into the storm for a meal anyway. But Manny, ever the optimist, never stops “managing” his restaurant and the skeleton crew that shows up more out of personal loyalty to him than from any sense of obligation to the company on this last day.

This slim novel at times reads like a Red Lobster manual on how to close down one of its stores at the end of the day as Manny continues to follow company procedures and policies right up to the second he turns the lock on the door and heads to his car (whose windshield, he already knows, has been smashed by a disgruntled employee). But along the way, we meet, and get to know, the crew that showed up to man the restaurant during its last hours, some of whom Manny was surprised to see show up at all. Among them are Eddie, the handicapped dishwasher; Ty, the chief cook; Roz, an old-timer with the company who is actually vested in the company’s pension plan; and Jacquie, another waitress and former girlfriend of Manny’s.

Last Night at the Lobster is about one man trying to make it through a painful day with his honor and self-respect in tact and O’Nan offers little in the way of drama other than Manny’s wishful thinking about his relationship with Jacquie, a yearning he still feels despite the fact that his new girlfriend is pregnant and Jacquie herself has moved on to a new relationship. Manny does manage to handle a few obliviously unreasonable customers, but one gets the feeling that they are just part of any day for him, something he can now do well with his eyes closed.

There are too few novels written about work, and almost none of them are about work in the service industry. O’Nan’s novel may be short, at only 146 pages, but he has packed enough into it that I doubt that anyone who reads it will ever be able to eat out again without a heightened awareness of those who make their meal possible.

Rated at: 3.5

British Librarians Are Getting Lonely

Is the library experience in the U.K. different from that in America and Canada? According to this Guardian Unlimited book blog, libraries in the U.K. are hurting due largely to non-participation by the general public and the disappearance of library materials that are checked out and never seen again.

Partly one can blame the outdated stereotype of bespectacled dragons demanding absolute silence for putting people off. More recently, the image of the library as the warm retreat of the homeless hasn't helped either.

However nimbly they have adapted, modernised, lost books and gained technology, become determinedly "functional" as invaluable resource centres rather than bookstores, the libraries are always needing to boost their profile. They need more borrowers and yet, one of their biggest problems, in my experience, is that "borrowing" is not a readily understood modern concept, however well-embedded it was in Carnegie's day.

I'm just not buying the fact that the concept of "borrowing" is no longer understood by people in the U.K. I lived in London for a few years, until the summer of 1999, and I didn't see that as a problem during my regular visits to the Richmond library. What struck me was how empty the library always seemed, no matter what day or hour I dropped by. In comparison to the regular crowds I've seen in several Houston libraries since coming home, the Richmond one may as well have shut down and no one would have noticed other than the regulars who came in to play or work on the computers provided for their use.

Even having seen that, I'm surprised that things are so bad for British libraries and I wonder what the real cause is. Americans often joke about our tendency to believe the stereotype about Brits being so much more "cultured" than the "boobs" in this country. Come on, my British friends, you are going to ruin your image if you don't start using your library cards again.

A Guitar and a Pen:Stories by Country Music's Greatest Songwriters

As a decades-long fan of country music, I can vouch for Vince Gill when he says in his foreword to A Guitar and a Pen, “…some of the greatest songwriters around are also some of the best storytellers.” Heck, whole movies can be, and have been, made from a three-minute country song without requiring much of a rewrite. Now, finally, with A Guitar and a Pen, arrives a collection of short stories from a group of songwriters responsible for some of the biggest hits and, much more importantly, some of the best songs, to come out of Nashville in the history of country music.

The collection includes stories from Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Bobby Braddock, Hal Ketchum, Janis Ian, Mark D. Sanders, Robbie Fulks, Marshall Chapman and Charlie Daniels, among others.

The twenty-five stories encompass a wide range of themes and writing styles. Among them are exaggerated tales of humor; stories of good love gone bad; some about growing up poor, or just growing up; one about the old West; some offering insights into the life of a songwriter; a few about early influences of musicians; even one about terrorism. I won’t claim that all of the stories worked for me, but this collection did have one of the better “hit” to “miss” ratios of any short story collection I’ve read in a while.

Among my favorites is Bob McDill’s “The Care and Treatment of Camp Cooks,” a story about a hunting club’s temperamental, but extremely talented, camp cook who goes on strike after one of the club members mistakenly offers an honest opinion on that evening’s meal when pressed to do so by the cook. Lesson learned by all but the cook. Another is “The Elk Hunters,” Tim Johnson’s story about a Nashville songwriter’s annual return to Oregon to bow-hunt elk with his brother and father and the shocking truths he learns about his father on one of the hunts.

There are also stories like the unforgettable “Gathering Together” by Robert Hicks, the story of Aunt Willie and her unique contribution to one family’s Thanksgiving meal and Monty Powell’s “The Point,” a touching account of how a man’s retirement dreams are ruined when he returns to the scene of his best childhood memories.

But the stories I found most interesting were the ones directly related to the country music business. The collection leads off with Robbie Fulks’ frank look at what life is like for those who do music “on a lower-than-celebrity level” as part of the presentation his story narrator makes at a local high school “Career Day” event, and it ends with “Will It Ever Happen Again,” a Michael Kosser story about a one-time hugely successful songwriter who hasn’t had a hit song in ten years and who might be forced to finally give up his dream. These are perfect bookend stories for a very fine short story collection.

Rated at: 4.0

Ups and Downs- or Not?

I spent a few minutes at Barnes & Noble with my 86-year-old father this weekend (he can only stand comfortably for a few minutes at a time before his knees start causing him real problems) browsing the "Literature" shelves to see if I might have missed something from any of my past favorite writers, some of whom I've been reading for decades.

I was forced to walk the aisles at a lot quicker pace than I like and, as the names flashed by, I started to wonder something about the ones that caught my eye: in what direction is their work trending? That is, does their later work stack up to what came before?

Here are a few of the names that jumped out at me, along with my gut feelings about the current state of their work (or at least my own reaction to that work):

Joyce Carol Oates/Rosamond Smith/Lauren Kelly - As good, if not better, than ever

John Irving - In decline and actually beginning to lose me as a fan

James Lee Burke - see Joyce Carol Oates, above

Robert B. Parker - In terminal decline - I've stopped keeping up with him at all

Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine - Current work strikes me as better than her earliest work but not as good as her best of her middle period work

Harry Turtledove - seems to write the same two books over and over again

Pat Conroy - has written true classics and is capable of writing another any time out

Anne Tyler - not quite achieving what she did in her earlier books but still one of the best out there

Elmer Kelton - later work is some of his best and includes a classic western or two

Larry McMurtry - his middle years produced his best work but he's still worth a look with every new book

Stephen King - Horror bores me now but I don't know if that's King fault or if I finally just grew up

Elizabeth George - Getting better and better

Tom Wolfe - Last couple of books make me wonder if he was ever as good as I first believed

Jane Smiley - Early work, I loved; later work and her wacko political stance has turned me completely off her writing

Dennis Lehane - later work is excellent but I still miss his Kenzie/Gennaro series

Those are the names that jumped off the shelf at me as I sprinted through the store well aware that my time was limited. I didn't buy a thing because the pace of the visit through me off, and I started to wonder on the way home if the writers have actually changed (declined, as often as not) or if I'm the one who has changed. Maybe my tastes are so different today from what they were years ago that I overrated authors at one point and can see them more clearly now for what they really are...or vice versa. Who knows?

Resistance

Really good alternate history does more than simply speculate about one or two of the limitless “what if” possibilities offered by the past. In the best writing of this type those “what ifs” are just starting points for stories that go well beyond the big picture to consider what the historical changes would mean to ordinary people caught up in their wake. Resistance, Owen Sheens’ debut novel, does exactly that, and does it remarkably well.

What if the allied invasion of France had been repelled by a German army fully prepared to meet the invaders on the beaches of Normandy? What if that failed invasion resulted in such a devastating defeat for the Allies that Germany was almost immediately able to land her soldiers on England’s southern coast and begin a march to London?

The women of the isolated Olchon Valley of Wales did not even have time to wonder “what if” before they woke up one morning to find that every one of their husbands and sons had vanished, leaving behind nothing to indicate where they had gone or when they might return. But Maggie, oldest of the women, knew in her heart that the men would be gone for a long time when she saw that her husband William had left their cows un-milked, something he had never done in all their years together. She was able to convince the rest of the women that their husbands had joined the resistance, something they hardly dare speak of even among themselves, and that it is their duty to work the farms on their own while their men were away.

And that is exactly what they try to do until a small German patrol suddenly appears in the valley on a mission of its own. Despite the women’s efforts to disguise the absence of the valley’s men, Captain Albrecht Wolfram quickly reaches the correct conclusion that the women are alone and that their husbands are involved in fighting the German invasion. Albrecht knows that he should report the situation to his superiors but he realizes that, if he does so, everyone in the valley will be killed as an example of what will happen to the families of others who join the underground resistance. Albrecht has already seen the worst that war has to offer and he does not have the stomach to cause the deaths of these innocent women. He, in fact, realizes that his patrol has dropped through the cracks of the German command and decides to keep his men safely in the valley long after their initial mission has been completed.

When harsh winter weather sets in, making it impossible for the soldiers to leave the valley even if they want to, both the women and the soldiers come to realize that they must depend on each other for survival. The women grudgingly reach the conclusion that their resistance is no longer possible. Out of necessity the two groups learn to accommodate each other and over the long winter months personal relationships change to the point that both sides almost forget that they are at war with each other. What they have in common is more important than their differences.

But seasons change, and winter is always followed by spring. Warmer weather opens the valley to the outside world again and the realities of life under a ruthless occupying force. Are the women in more danger from German reprisal or from their neighbors who see them as collaborators? Should they have done more to resist the valley’s invaders? What will their husbands think of them? Those are just some of the questions that readers will ponder long after they turn the last page of Resistance.

This one is not to be missed.

Rated at: 5.0

Mary Badham and Harper Lee

I find it a bit sad, but not surprising considering Harper Lee's love of privacy, that Mary Badham who played Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird" has not spoken with Miss Lee since about the time the movie was released. What is surprising is that the book and movie still have a huge impact on her life as this short article from The Birmingham News describes:

Now 55 and living in rural Virginia, Badham has long since lost touch with Lee, who has staunchly and successfully maintained her privacy since "To Kill a Mockingbird" came out.

"I figure she knows how to get in touch with me if she wants to call me," Badham says. "But I don't want to bother her.

"I'd love to talk to her, just to say thank you for my life and that I hope I'm doing a good job with what has become my life, working with this book and the film."

Although Badham gave up acting when she was 13, she still goes all over the country and around the world talking to schoolchildren and literacy groups about both the book and the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird."

For what it's worth, Wikipedia says that, "At present Badham is an art restorer and a college testing coordinator. Married to a school teacher, and the mother of two..."