Peter Orner

Peter Orner llegeix sempre i a tot arreu: al restaurant d'un hospital, al soterrani de casa, quan acompanya la seva filla al parc, en un autobús a Haití, durant les crisis sentimentals, quan està tramitant el seu divorci, durant la malaltia i la mort del seu pare. La lectura l'acompanya, l'ajuda a veure-hi clar i a entendre millor el món, l'il·lumina, li fa de refugi i l'ajuda a tirar endavant. I un dia decideix escriure sobre el paper de la narrativa en la seva vida, com ha quedat impresa en la seva història personal. El resultat és un llibre commovedor, lúcid i honest que convoca escriptors com Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, James Salter, J.D. Salinger o Juan Rulfo i explora el plaer de la lectura, la solitud i l'ofici d'escriure, i el paper essencial que té la literatura en les nostres vides.… (mere)

In this skillful and varied collection, Peter Orner once again shows us how it's done. "It" in this case being short fiction or brief, exquisite vignettes taken from his own experience. There are short stories here that are rooted firmly in their settings: some in the sleepy, hippie-inflected hills of Northern California, others in Fall River, Massachusetts's Jewish community. There are what I can only assume are semi-autobiographical stories describing how a new marriage breaks down as one of the parties slowly succumbs to mental illness. There's a lovely, perhaps necessarily incomplete homage to Len, a wildly inventive, endlessly energetic summer camp director who is slowly losing his life to a terminal illness he's forced to keep secret from his past associates. There are stories about Peter Orner's lawyer dad that are mostly about how different they were and how much he misses his dad anyway. There are a few stories you might have heard in a dorm room late at night as a college junior. And, as in any short story collection of any length, there are some strays. I can particularly recommend the title story, "Padanaram", "Naked Man Hides", and the aforementioned "Ineffectual Tribute to Len" which may be the real heartbreaker here. But Orner's batting average is so much higher than the average Tin House submission rat's that opinions are bound to vary and most things here work on at least one level.

What holds all of this together is an attention to craft and a deeply held appreciation for the short story form. Orner argues that while novels might tell us more about a character and their lives, their very size closes off their narrative: they purport to tell the definitive story of a person or an event. A short story, on the other hand, is, thanks to its very length and structure, half-built, incomplete, and, therefore, always a bit unfinished. It's eternally open and makes no claims to setting down a definitive account of anything or anyone. It's something to consider, and the stories in this volume make the author's case fairly well. So well that Orner himself seems to have come up in the world considerably since the relative success of "Am I Alone Here?" He's now teaching at Dartmouth and, while I'm not sure of the timeframe here, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright to, of all places, Namibia. Quite frankly, few writers working today deserve it more than he does. Sentence by sentence and story by story, Peter Orner shows that he's the real thing.… (mere)

I met Peter Orner through "Am I Alone Here?", his beguiling mix of autobiography and literary musings. If that book made anything clear, it was that the author takes the short story form very seriously. "Esther Stories" bears that out. As one might expect, not every story here hits its mark, but at its best, the stories here more or less provide supporting evidence the author's claim that the short story provides authors more freedom to tell a story -- any kind of story -- than any other literary medium. The best stories here -- "County Road G", "The Two Poes", "At the Rainbow Motel", "Pile of Clothes", and the cycle of stories that focus on Esther Burman, the collection's namesake -- are small masterpieces, arguments in favor of the short story itself. It helps, I think, that many characters in these stories are committed storytellers themselves. "Esther Stories" overflows with rumors, family legends, fish stories, and second-hand accounts. In "Am I Alone Here?" Orner came off as a compulsive reader fairly obsessed by literature. In these stories, he seems to want to show that we are all, in our own way, obsessed by narratives of some sort.

Having said that, I liked the stories about the Burman family of Chicago much more than the ones about the Kaplan family of Fall River, Massachusetts. That can probably be chalked up to nothing more than personal preference, but that also counts for something. Some of this collection's other stories, while well-crafted, didn't really hit me the way the author might have intended them to. Others seemed, well, too short to really grab my attention. But novels have their strong and weak points as well: nobody makes every shot they take. I expect that I'll revisit some of these stories more than once and am happy to say I've got a one or two of Orner's other short story collections on my Kindle. Recommended.… (mere)