ALL AROUND THEY'RE TAKING DOWN THE LIGHTS

by Adam Berlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Actors, alcoholics, and other deluded men populate Berlin’s debut short fiction collection.

An ambivalent college student hosts his struggling actor friend in his Boston dorm, rebuffing the latter’s attempts to get him to return to New York and their days of partying and auditions. A man and his new wife go on a trip to Hawaii—where he lived for a year as a child—but his memories, coupled with the fact that his wife has to work during the day, bring the vacation to a boil. An underqualified striver is hired to teach karate to a 7-year-old autistic boy, but his student is reluctant to speak or make any contact. In these 15 stories, Berlin probes the depths of male fantasy, fear, and self-invention, and the dark ends to which they often lead. In one of the more memorable tales, “Practice Makes,” a man who has been sentenced to three years in prison for beating up a bartender is terrified that he won’t be able to defecate in the crowded quarters of a cell. In order to practice, he asks the woman he’s dating to watch him while he’s on the toilet. She’s unexpectedly supportive. (“‘You look sexy even on the pot,’ she said. I rested my head on my fist like The Thinker. ‘I always thought he was doing that too,’ she said.”) The image resonates throughout the rest of the collection: A man who wants to see himself a certain way—a tough guy, a professional, an artist, someone with some dignity—is placed beneath the discomfiting gaze of someone who can see through his facade. A film buff, an amateur yachtsman, an author on a poorly attended book tour who finds himself alone in a Red Lobster—these are the sort of characters on whom the author fixes his lens, testing how long they can withstand the pressure of being examined.

Berlin’s prose is sharp, particularly his dialogue. When the man about to go to prison meets a gastroenterologist in a bar, the doctor attempts to assuage the man’s bathroom fears: “When it concerns fecal matter, I’ve heard and seen it all. If it’s in your head, your body will take over. The body always takes over. The body wins no matter what anyone says.” The author’s love of movies sometimes leads to Hollywood tropes bleeding into his fiction, however; his male protagonists are often a bit too cool, his female characters a bit too enamored of them. When the same soon-to-be prisoner meets a woman in a bar and tells her he’s going away in 26 days, she responds, smartly, “It’s perfect. Twenty-six days is the exact number of days it takes for me to get sick of someone. At the very moment I start tiring of you, you’ll be gone.” It’s a good line, but not a particularly believable one, especially from a woman who just learned the man she’s flirting with is a violent drunk. There’s much here to like, but in nearly every story, the reader is left wishing Berlin had set aside his stylish flourishes to present a more true-to-life version of masculinity.

A beery, imperfect collection about the stories men tell themselves.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES | GENERAL FICTION