Review by New York Times Review
"JOPLIN AND DICKENS," One of the 44 stories making up "Cries for Help, Various," Padgett Powell's ninth book of fiction, features the eponymous Janis and Charles (or "Charlie") as 20th-century third-grade classmates. It sounds like the kind of paint-by-numbers, "throw some mismatched historical personages into an incongruous setting" mash-up familiar to any reader of contemporary literary journals. But because this is a Padgett Powell story, the authorial voice intrudes before the first paragraph is out, and levels this charge at itself: "Oh my this is poetic. Let's abjure poetry because the conceit of this - Janis Joplin and Mr. Dickens a century out of his time - is already inane. We will stick to the facts and try not to be pretty." At the end of the story - one of the most affecting in this collection, which is by turns moving, funny and maddening - young Charlie, who speaks in elevated Victorian paragraphs, describes his plight to Janis (who has just given him a sloppy kiss): "I don't fit in today," he tells her, "but you do, as shy as you seem, and as troubled. Your desperation is within reach of its targets, I mean, Miss Joplin. Mine is not. Mine is well lost. . . . I am an old man, somehow, ill-befitting this age, and my age." "Anywhere he is, he doesn't fit in," a friend said of Powell in a 2009 New York Times Magazine profile. Now 63, Powell published his first book in 1984, but he's a Southern writer who would have fit more neatly into the previous decade (and maybe another region), when metafiction, arch surrealism and maximalist language reigned. These stories are very much in the key of Donald Barthelme - one of the book's two dedicatees; the other is Powell's deceased pit bull - with touches of Nicholson Baker's fascination with the microscopic and the nostalgic. Here is the entirety of "Longing" (Powell's best subject, often paired with deterioration and the honor in hopeless persistence): "The kind of exhaustion I am talking about is, simply, or not simply, the broken heart. It makes you long to hold hands with someone you have not hurt who has not hurt you. This longing would be immediately and hotly extant if a dark girl offered you a cup of flan." Several hallmarks are present: self-conscious feints ("simply, or not simply"); un-self-conscious description of heartache; then, as if afraid of anything approaching sentimentality, a wild turn of the steering wheel with bureaucratic diction and tortured syntax ("immediately and hotly extant") and a baffling non sequitur (why "a dark girl"? Why "a cup of flan"?). You already know if you're the audience for whom this is catnip or cat food. The effect of reading these stories consecutively is a bit like being buttonholed by the garrulous old-timer at the bar whose manifold enthusiasms may be the result of alcohol, mild insanity or academic tenure (or, as is often the case, all three), but whose digressions you keep listening to because, in the midst of their nonsensical grandstanding, they regularly embed a fragment of wisdom, a brilliantly turned phrase or a laugh-inducing one-liner. (A throwaway from the Dickens story: "Richard Leech labored under the appellation Dick Leech, which did not make his life any happier.") "Cries for Help, Various" will not, I suspect, be discussed by a single Chardonnay-and-brie book club in America, though I would pay good money to watch the author visit one such gathering. It will more likely be read by students and graduates of M.F.A. programs who also work in a comic experimental mode; the ones for whom what's beside the point is, in fact, the point; the ones who are negotiating the quivery tightrope between irony and sincerity; the ones who, even with their fellow writers - the Dickenses among the Joplins - don't quite fit in. 'I am an old man, somehow, ill-befitting this age, and my age.' TEDDY WAYNE'S third novel, "Loner," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Powell's restlessly experimental books often defy classification. They are also very funny. Never has he so clearly exhibited these traits as in these 44 stories. Ranging from the profound to the grotesque, but generally residing in the absurd, Powell's tales portray morally, linguistically, and geographically bewildered individuals as zealous as they are alone. In one, a man accidentally buys his wife a pair of live-porcupine earrings, and in another his wife complains about them to a girlfriend. An outsider who does not think much or have much to say rambles on about his desire to paint, his favorite kinds of snow, and the two sisters he beds simultaneously. A team of foreigners with collective amnesia tries to piece together their circumstances after evidently crashing a plane in the South American jungle. A germophobic Asian piano student inadvertently discovers that he has a death touch. Powell's wonderfully playful syntax epitomizes his madcap vision and ultimately steals the show. As in his novel, You and Me (2012), Beckett comes to mind, though Powell demonstrates his own invigorating love of language and life.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Powell (Edisto) has occasionally been pigeonholed as a sort of Southern Donald Barthelme, and it is true that most of the 44 stories collected here can be described as short comic tales with a distinct Dixie swagger. But these stories offer even more, such as the emotional vigor of "Spy," in which an aging father comes to suspect that his daughter is working for the CIA ("My daughter wears a wire, I a diaper") or the pathos of "A Local Boy," in which a rock-bottom loser blames his shortcomings on Sherman's March. Other stories imagine a grade school friendship between Charles Dickens and Janis Joplin ("Joplin and Dickens") and take the point of view of a recluse considering investing in a Ukrainian mail-order bride ("The Retarded Hermit"); several ("Wagons, Ho!" and "The New World") meditate on the settling of America. There's also a pair of companion pieces to Powell's The Interrogative Mood ("The Imperative Mood" and "The Indicative Mood") and a strange trilogy about Boris Yeltsin. But the best of these stories-and they're all good-plumb for depth and coax profundity out of the moody detritus of Americana. Powell's range is matched only by his sense of play, and this book is a skeleton key to an extremely gifted and quintessentially American writer, at home in any form. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A playful and provoking clutch of stories that forces words and themes into unfamiliar territory. In 2009, veteran literary gamesman Powell (You Me, 2012, etc.) published The Interrogative Mood, a novel told exclusively in questions. Two of the 44 (usually brief) stories here are sequels of a sort. In "The Imperative Mood," demand piles up on demand ("Prepare your backpack. Line up all the Velcro closures in your environment"), in time suggesting the flimsiness of advice and of the demands we make on others. Similarly, "The Indicative Mood" layers factual statements to reveal the hollowness of information without context. Many of these stories can be read as satires of common literary tropes, though Powell's language is so slippery and spiky they don't usually qualify as outrightly comic. Stories like "Horses," "Dusk," and "Wagons, Ho!" dismantle Western themes, and "Spy" is a brief sendup of espionage tales narrated by a man whose teenage daughter works for the CIA ("Trying to find out where she has been on a Saturday night may be a breach of national security"). Powell's loopiness can be fun: the narrator of "Change of Life" contemplates buying a "Government Cookie Flyer," and while the nature of that contraption is never explained, the critique of irrational covetousness gets over. But many of these stories are so slathered in non sequiturs that it can be hard to find a toehold. A sketch about "meat-shirt-making monks"? Janis Joplin and Charles Dickens imagined as high school classmates? Powell's given fair warning"We are not in the zone of logic"but puzzling out his rhetorical feints is often more exhausting than rewarding. Powell has great fun with abstraction that harks back to Barthelme and the Modernists, though not every riff registers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
