In spite of my previously professed preference for novels, I have read and enjoyed several short story collections lately.
28. All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. Similar in many ways to #25 Stop That Girl by another Elizabeth (McKenzie, who in fact is named in one of the fawning blurbs by little-known authors on the back, one of whom is Thisbe Nissen, whose name I’ve always admired even if I have not read his [her?] books), this is a novel in stories about Charlotte Anne Byers, who eventually goes through a convoluted dropping of the Anne on her way to adulthood; the stories alternate between childhood and adulthood, though I found the former rather than the latter more engaging, making me wonder, as I did with the aforementioned Stop That Girl, whether all stories with intriguing young heroines have them grow up into boring, crazy women, in this case who are boringly redeemed by the love of a younger man, though the book itself isn’t boring, in fact it’s quite funny, such as in the opening story when she says she is seeking Owen Wilson (not an Owen Wilson type, she clarifies, but the man himself), and I often recognized myself in bits (though not the parts that involved, as did Crane’s previous collection, #24 When the Messenger is Hot, an opera-singing dying/dead mother, Iowan step-family, authorial move from NYC to Chicago, and an annoying tendency to use the second person narrative when things got a bit too autobiographical), as in her childhood obsession with her friend’s Crissy dolls, one of which I owned as a child, and whose growing hair never broke, though I wrote previously about how Crissy’s “sister” Velvet’s hair mechanism did break, and if you find this ongoing sentence with commas and parentheticals to be very annoying, then you might want to give the book a miss, because Crane is very fond of them and can go on for over a page, though, admittedly, she does it more skillfully than do I.
29. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander. I wasn’t in the mood for dark humor, but this collection won me over. It’s extremely dark (lots of death, including people, a dog, a monkey) but so clever, subversive and funny (God is a happy, giant chicken!; the Peanuts characters take sides in warring religious factions!) that the end result is almost charming. I laughed out loud several times, and would have read more parts aloud except that my husband had to leave for work and I didn’t think Drake would get the jokes.
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