Review by New York Times Review
THE men in Jess Walter's pungent new story collection, "We Live in Water," are coming apart. These men - and they are exclusively men, save a few catalytic female characters - are what society (and ex-wives) commonly label disappointments. Trading in ill-considered choices, they have made a habit of letting folks down - their women, their kids, their friends, their creditors and, chiefly, themselves. Walter's protagonists endure a buffet of self-inflicted misfortune, everything from meth addiction to dodgy parenting, often served in a combo platter with a side of unlucky in love. His characters are all searching, with varying levels of commitment and insight. None succeed. Instead, after years of deflecting criticism and judgment in favor of ego puffing, serial infidelities and soothing, mindaddling chemical baths, they finally hit the wall of recognition when it is too late - their girl is gone for good, their son eyes them with intractable pity, they are about to be beaten to death and tossed in a lake. Unlike what one is taught in therapy, their aha moments bring little comfort or joy. No one in Walter's stories is made whole by epiphany. No one rushes out and buys an elliptical trainer or bran flakes. When self-awareness comes, as it does for a recovering addict named Bit in the opening story, "Anything Helps," it offers only more gristle to choke down. "Why can't we be the things that we see and think? Why do we always have to be these sad stories?" Bit laments in group, still clinging to his survivalist, alcoholic charm. At the end, after an enervating exchange with his estranged pubescent son, now living in foster care with well-meaning but simple Christians, Bit's enlightenment leaves him longing for death, believing all anyone becomes is "a twitching bunch of memories and mistakes, regrets." All of which is to say, this is not "Beautiful Ruins" - more just ruin; beauty here is something for suckers. Not that the book is a downer. Well, maybe a little. But that's only because Walter is unflinching and, possibly, a bit depressed, which is what happens to any compassionate, reasonable person who stares too closely at the world. (As Walter does to captivating effect in "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," which juxtaposes a running bit about bike theft with gutpunching observations about poverty and spousal abuse.) Walter makes you laugh, then makes you feel a little queasy about it. This is the alchemy of the damned. Any wisdom, when it comes, comes from children - or rather, from the loss of their innocence and our observation of it. We see children in dire straits, children of tweakers, gamblers and other fallen men, and then we see what becomes of these kids when they too have grown, and reached, and failed. Wade, a white-collar criminal sentenced to a pilot program tutoring second graders and sophomores, must read the same book every time to his student Drew, a waif with no healthy male role models in his impecunious life. "Don't you want to bring another book?" Wade asks. Drew demurs, says he doesn't know what's in those other books. "Isn't that the fun, finding out?" Drew remains dubious. He knows better. How for most of the planet, "finding out" is rarely fun. How when life is at its harshest, knowing exactly what the ending will be counts more than a hot dinner. The last five pages of the book Wade reads to Drew contain no words. They are, Walter writes, the pages the boy likes best. It is a moment of exquisite empathy. The stillness of the scene, a child safe on a man's lap, transported, if only for a few minutes, is devastating. It calls to mind both the unparalleled power of stories and their limitations. (Few are the writers who appreciate how, not just for some things but for most things that matter, there are no words.) Walter provides a few respites from the enticing murk. The naïve stalker in "Virgo" who alters horoscopes to manipulate his lover's moods is funny and pitiful, as is the narrator of the zombie apocalypse romp, "Don't Eat Cat," who rightfully declaims: "Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed firstborn sons ..." And on and on, summarizing, "Maybe it's always the end of the world." This is funny because it's true, and horrible because it's true, and funny because it's horrible, and so on, forever. FORTUNATELY, Walter is a bighearted man who excels at writing about other bighearted, if broken, men. That generosity of spirit, coupled with Walter's seeming inability to look away from the messy bits, elevates these stories from dirges to symphonies. For Walter, we do live in water, an immense soup of muddled humanity sloshing around and spilling over, soaking us all. Everything is a reflection of everything else, with no such thing as disconnection. Or isolation. Or edges. Or solid ground. "Whole worlds exist beneath the surface," thinks the lost son in the title story as he stares into a still lake. "And maybe you can't see down there ... but there's a part of you that knows." Walter does see down there. He understands that no matter how often we insist we won't be able to live with ourselves, we really have no other choice. It's sink or swim. Allison Glock, the author of the memoir "Beauty Before Comfort," is a contributing editor for Garden & Gun magazine. She is at work on a poetry collection and, with her husband, a young adult novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This is the first collection of short stories, all of which have appeared previously in Harper's and McSweeney's, among other literary publications, from the much-acclaimed, best-selling Walter (Beautiful Ruins, 2012). With their visceral depictions of the homeless, the bereft, and the marginalized, often presented with a signature blend of wicked humor and heartbreaking tenderness, Walter's intense stories speak directly to the contemporary American experience. In Anything Helps, a homeless father has lost his wife to a heroin overdose and his son to social services. Determined to buy the latest Harry Potter novel for his son, he brings a practiced eye to his begging, opting to go to cardboard. In the title story, Walter expertly uses the tropes of crime fiction to tell the grim story of an unrepentant gambler who steals from the wrong person, and his young son, who is forever haunted by his father's disappearance. In Don't Eat Cat, Walter turns to zombie fiction to unleash a hilarious satire of political correctness (I'm not one of those reactionaries, but hiring zombies for food service? I just think that's wrong ). Wildly entertaining and thought-provoking fiction from a prodigiously talented writer.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Title notwithstanding, most of the characters in Walter's short stories live in Spokane, Ore., but they are often under water, or nearly so. Spokane, as Walter makes clear, bears little relationship to Portland or Seattle, the Pacific Northwest's name-brand cities. There are no locavores here, and the one potential latte drinker is stuck in Spokane doing his court-mandated community service and prefers scotch, anyway. Walter (Beautiful Ruins) writes-beautifully-about hard luck divorced dads, addicts, con artists, working men trying to keep things together, and a few zombies who've made the Seattle of the future look a lot like the Spokane of the present, which Walter describes as a place where, no matter how big your house is, "you're never more than three blocks from a bad neighborhood." Both "Anything Helps" and "Don't Eat Cat" (rule #1 for zombies trying to hold down a job and an apartment) are included in 2012 best-of anthologies, but good as they are, the star is the title story, a heartbreaker set in a formerly seedy, now touristed part of Idaho. Darkly funny, sneakily sad, these stories are very, very good. You know the way Web sites recommend books by saying if you liked this, you'll like that? The algorithm for this debut collection is straightforward: if you like to read, you'll like this book. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins and Associates. (Feb. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The debut story collection from Walter proves he's as skilled at satire and class commentary in the short form as in his novels (Beautiful Ruins, 2012, etc.). Most of the 13 stories here are set in the present-day Northwest, where the Great Recession has left middle-class family men bereft and brought the destitute into the spotlight. "Anything Helps" is told from the point of view of a homeless man whose effort to acquire a Harry Potter novel emphasizes his undoing as a stable parent. "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown of Spokane, Washington" is a parody of poker-faced government reports, revealing the private frustration of a man living near a battered-women's shelter. Drug addicts and hard-luck cases abound here, but these stories aren't melodramatic or even dour. Walter's prose is straightforward and funny, and like Richard Russo, he knows his protagonists are concerned with their immediate predicaments, not the socioeconomic mechanisms that put them there. "Wheelbarrow Kings," for instance, follows two meth addicts trying to pawn a projection TV, and the story's power comes from Walter's deft tracking of their minute-by-minute, dollar-by-dollar concerns and their clumsy but canny attempts to resolve them. Still, Walter can't resist a zombie story--the quintessential genre for socioeconomic allegories--and in "Don't Eat Cat," he's written a stellar one. Set in a near future in which a powerful club drug has bred rage-prone, feline-craving addicts, the story deftly blends romance, comic riffs on politically correct culture and dystopian horror. Women are largely absent except as lost objects of affection, but the men are not simply of a type: The small-time scam artist in "Helpless Little Things" bears little resemblance to the convicted white-collar criminal in "The Wolf and the Wild," though they both reflect Walter's concerns about capitalism gone bad. A witty and sobering snapshot of recession-era America.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
