A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin

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Reviewed by: A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin Frank Wilson (bio) Richard Burgin, A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories (Goliad Press, 2018), 412 pp. Whether it be Katherine Anne Porter or John Cheever, O. Henry or John O'Hara, the best short story writers have one thing in common: The stories they write are the kind only they write. What accounts for this is the singular voice of the storyteller. If we regard the novella as the short story writer's long form, then the opening sentence of Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider can be said to demonstrate this: "Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep." Now consider this opening paragraph of Richard Burgin's story "The Spirit of New York": I scare people, usually women, I admit. I don't hurt them, or even wish to; I simply jump out at them, or suddenly appear from a corner or doorway or from behind a parked car or tree. After they gasp or scream I apologize profusely and try to calm them down. I do it so they think it could have been an accident. Almost immediately I feel remorse and hope they forgive me, but it's also true I feel tremendous pleasure. Porter's sentence and Burgin's paragraph are completely unalike except for one thing: The tone of the telling compels one to keep on reading. The 25 stories gathered in A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin provide ample evidence that Burgin deserves to be numbered among the masters of the short story. Together they offer an interior view of contemporary life, since what the stories are mostly about is what [End Page 302] is going on inside the heads of the protagonists. "The Urn" is told in the second person. Barry's mother has recently died and left him a fortune. He goes to London and then Madrid, where he begins carrying the urn bearing his mother's ashes around with him, "in part to share what was beautiful in the city, in part just for the company." That's when the second-person singular kicks in: You remember that you started talking to yourself in your mind, then, the way you are now in New York, never calling yourself "Barry" but addressing yourself in the second person instead. Between talking to yourself and talking to your mother it got pretty complicated sometimes. . . . You were afraid to be away from the urn . . . and carried it everywhere with you, once even to a bar. Then you worried that you'd drink too much and leave it in the bar or else on the metro. This is all passing strange, of course, and things get stranger and scarier as the story continues, but Barry's quasi-rational matter-of-factness will proceed at an even tempo throughout, which makes everything just creepier. Speaking of creepy, Barry reappears in Burgin's novel Rivers Last Longer, where he malevolently blossoms into probably the creepiest character in American fiction since Charles Anthony Bruno in Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. Not all of the stories are grim or weird. "Vivian and Sid in Maui" is a quirkily touching tale of the love that bonds the title characters in spite of their differences—as Vivian puts it, Sid is "a kind of permanent nontenured lecturer at the same university in Boston where I got tenure nine years ago." And "Caesar" moves from an angry encounter with a cab driver to a scary encounter in a hotel room to an act of charity that leaves the title character feeling "good . . . in a peaceful sort of way, like sitting next to a fireplace would feel, he imagined, where your thoughts finally settle and slowly melt"—a consummation devoutly wished, it would seem, by many of Burgin's characters. All of the stories are grounded in the insight that many...