Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern — by Stuart Dybeck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
When I was in college, I had a literary-minded classmate who introduced me to the concept of the ‘minor cliché.’ Major clichés, his theory went, not just clichés of language but of situation and character, have been used so often that they are easily recognizable as such and hence easily avoidable: the hooker with the heart of gold, the young lovers whose romance is ended by fatal disease, a character “grinning sheepishly” or described as “a diamond in the rough.” But minor clichés are more insidious (and by implication, more successful) because they have been deployed sparingly enough that they aren’t immediately recognizable as ready-made, at least to most readers and writers.
Short-story writer Stuart Dybek, who has just published two collections of stories, the love stories of “Paper Lantern” and the short-shorts of “Ecstatic Cahoots,” is a crafty purveyor of the minor cliché. If, for example, an old counter man at a Jewish deli in one of his stories imparts a bracing bit of worldly wisdom to a hungry young man, you can be sure that at some point his forearm will reveal a concentration-camp tattoo, or that the Hollywood mogul in “Happy Endings” will be a blunt man of bottomless appetites who smokes a pungent cigarillo; or that strays wisps of female coiffure will be poeticized into “tendrils” or that a day of perfect weather is described as “achingly beautiful.” (On second thought, maybe the last one is just a straight-up cliché.)
Dybek is best known for obsessive exercises in pining regret like the tour de force “We Didn’t,” in which a teenage romance is forever left unconsummated because of the ill-timed discovery of a body body, and it’s not surprising that many of his stories, especially those in “Paper Lantern, ” reveal a soft, sweet core of lush nostalgia.
Much of “Paper Lantern” is not stories per se as much as a series of diffuse meditations upon a single theme: waiting, memory, magic, the ocean, Life as Opera.
In “Cordoba,” an amorous, Lorca-quoting high-schooler, exiled from his girlfriend’s apartment by her suspicious father, makes his way through the streets of freezing wintertime Chicago. He takes refuge in a bar, where the hard-case bartender grudgingly pours him a drink:
“He set a shot glass before me and, staring into my face rather than at the glass, filled it to the brim. Each man has his own way to show he’s nobody’s fool, and pouring shots without looking at the glass was the bartender’s: he knew I was underage.”
The kid is picked up by a motorist, who proudly shows him a note — with a telephone number — from a beautiful woman the motorist has just met at a bar and that he is planning to hook up with. The kid loses the note; the motorist forces him to empty his pockets, then, when the note is still not found, furiously ejects him into the c cold. The kid finally makes his way home, and, while unwrapping his long scarf, discovers the note lodged there. He calls the number on the note and has a loaded conversation with the woman on the other end of the line:
“I wanted to hear your voice. To see if you’re real?'”
“That’s a strange thing to say. Are you real?”
“No,” I said, “Actually, I’m not.”
“At least you know that,” she said, “which puts you ahead of the game. Most unreal men — which is the vast majority — don’t know they aren’t, and those few that do usually can’t bear to admit. So there’s still a chance that hopefully some night years to come, you’ll have a different answer. Good luck with that.”
The story concludes with the narrator staring at the phone, wanting to call his girlfriend, “still young and foolish enough to wonder who I’d be.” Old-fashioned in its reliable climactic epiphany delivered by an unlikely and slightly mysterious source of wisdom (think James Joyce’s Dubliners), “Cordoba” nevertheless has a power that comes from solid craft and a sharp memory of the simultaneous sense of life’s absurdity and hunger for meaning that permeates adolescence.
In “Goodwill,” a lubricious young man accompanies his game, sexy girlfriend on a costume-changing trip to a vintage clothing store. He gives his opinion of the expedition, which is a verdict that could stand for these two collections of stories: “It wasn’t bad. Sort of like entering a time machine.”
