The Writer Who Never Was . . . and Still Is

Abstract

The Writer Who Never Was . . . and Still Is Bruce Allen (bio) Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories by Richard Stern (TriQuarterly Books, 2005. x + 610 pages. $29.95) Now in his eightieth year, Richard Stern is poised to join the not always visible company of accomplished writers eminently worthy of our continuing attention. It seems therefore a good time for a backward look at his recently published retrospective collection: "Forty-nine stories, and just about forty-nine years writing them," Stern informs us, in a wry author's note preceding several hundred pages of intricately textured intellectual drama. Frequently labeled that mythical beast "the writer's writer," Stern has combined a busy lifetime of teaching (primarily at the University of Chicago, with detours to other prestigious institutions of higher learning at home and abroad) with the production of such critically praised novels as Golk, Natural Shocks, and Other Men's Daughters, four earlier collections of stories, and an enormous amount of essays, criticism, and miscellaneous commentary. Flying stubbornly beneath the radar during all his travels, Stern remains uncorrupted, as it were, by celebrity or commercial success. Ever the keen critic, he has ruefully characterized himself as "a has-been without ever having been a been." Almonds to Zhoof suggests, nevertheless, that Stern is someone whom we might consider a somebody. His densely packed stories analyze, with clinical precision and mordant wit, states of engaged mind and inflamed emotion. They arrive bearing impressive if not imposing loads of complex and often arcane information. His vivid sentences, animated by colorful diction and arresting phrases, have earned comparison to those of his colleague and lifelong friend Saul Bellow. Stern's phrase-making skills are abundant. A woman flailing about [End Page xx] in a demanding nexus of personal relationships "had the isolation of a pioneer in the circumstances of a soap opera." A compulsive philander justifies his dalliances as simple human nature: "We swim in a sexual sea, we measure our affective lives by sexuality." Virtually every one of these forty-nine stories contains at least one memorable aphoristic statement. Their range of subject matter is surprisingly broad. The teaching life, for example, is captured in a slight yet incisive vignette revealing an esl teacher's genial condescension toward his adult students ("Good Morrow, Swine"); and a charmingly relaxed recounting of a veteran teacher's reminiscences sketches a likable character portrait ("Wisler Remembers"). Marital unhappiness and conflict receive nicely varied treatments in portrayals of a bright woman surviving dependents who threaten to consume her life ("Troubles"), of an unfaithful husband who is never called to account for his treachery ("Veni, Vidi, . . . Wendt"), and in a subtly moving revelation of the sturdy mind and heart of a luckless bus driver who refuses to resent his family's scornful disregard ("Riordan's Fiftieth"). Stern stares the uncomfortable themes of parental callowness and failure in the face in matching stories that depict a middle-aged man's surprised comprehension of his moribund parents' graceful stoicism ("Dr. Cahn's Visit") and a soon-to-be-bereaved son's mixed emotions at the prospect of his estranged mother's imminent death ("Packages"). Elsewhere a father's confession of a sexual misdeed widens the gap between him and his astonished young son ("Gifts"); and a sentient older man fears for the future of his "inadequate, repulsive" and prematurely aging adult son ("The Illegibility of This World"). Sexual opportunists and their victims appear in depictions of a smarmy careerist's heartless "conquests" ("A Counterfactual Proposition"); a hopeful seducer's blackly comic European misadventure ("Orvieta Dominos, Bolsena Eels"); a hardworking single woman's exploitation by her floundering grown children and her underachieving boyfriend ("The Ideal Address"); and, in a clever reversal, an itinerant journalist becomes the victim of an unstable woman hired to assist his research ("East, West . . . Midwest"). Two of Stern's most fully drawn female characters dominate a fascinating seriocomic account of a lonely woman's romantic idealization of her phlegmatic dentist ("Teeth") and a crisply plotted tale of a mousy hotel cashier whose compulsive officiousness enables a ludicrous act of violence ("Wanderers"). The elements of misdirection and surprise that grace these last two excellent stories are largely absent from...