Published by Viking on January 30, 2014
I had never heard of April Wilder before reading this collection of her stories. I am now a devoted fan. The characters in her stories are trying to decide what they want from life. They are forming and readjusting their understandings of relationships and families. They are quirky and lonely and usually a little messed up, but they're not giving up on the only lives they have.
Wilder often pulls off the neat trick of telling light stories about dark subjects. "The Butcher Shop" is about a man who, with little assistance from his friends, is trying to come to terms with the end of his marriage and the lesser disasters that make up his life. While discussing Sammy Sosa's corked bat with a group of friends, the narrator of "We Were Champions" thinks back to the man who coached her softball team when she was sixteen and who, like her current boyfriend, occasionally had sex with her but was really more interested in baseball. In that story, I love her comparison of sex to "two people struggling to fit through a turnstile."
Much of the title story takes place in traffic school. After racing to Iowa for a date she made online, Kit hears a story about a man who hit someone without noticing and begins to obsess about whether she has done the same thing. Her plan to cure the obsession, like everything else in her life, doesn't work out as she expected, but she finds inspiration to change in an unexpected place.
In "Me Me Me," a woman who compartmentalizes her life to the point of schizophrenia tries to decide what to do about a slightly dysfunctional sister who wants to adopt a troubled child. A woman in "Christiania" takes a post-divorce trip with a platonic vegan friend and finds that the relationship is just as exhausting as her marriage.
Alternately sweet and sad, hopeful and realistic, "It's a Long Dang Life" is one of the best madcap family dramas I've encountered in short fiction. Lacey's boyfriend, Paul Odd, 65-years-old and aptly named, wants to marry her but he's in love with Miller Genuine Draft. Odd (who understands that "it's a long life when it's the wrong life, man") gets up and tries his best every day for as long as he can before passing out. Still, he's more fun than the members of Lacey's uptight family. The final paragraph sums up the joys and sorrows of life about as well as anything I've ever read.
The novella "You're That Guy" is a departure from the family dramas that fill the rest of the book. Lurking in the background of this sad macabre comedy are a dead dog and a man who carries a grotesque doll wherever he goes. While some of the characters are strange, we are reminded that people are "only improbable at a distance." Up close, they're just people.
The only story that didn't work for me, "Three Men," is not so much a story as three character sketches of the flawed men in a woman's life: her husband, her brother, and her father. "The Creative Writing Instructor Evaluation Form" isn't a conventional story, but it's quite funny.
Wilder's observant writing style is clever and sharp without calling attention to itself. In their own way, each story reminds us that whether or not life is an accident, we need to make it purposeful. Many of these stories are worth reading twice, to better appreciate the subtle thoughtfulness and good humor with which Wilder teaches that lesson.
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