Jess Walter’s novels are warm, engaging, funny, quirky character stories, with a strong connection to his hometown of Spokane, Washington. Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions were both lovely reads. His latest published work is a collection of short stories. How would his style translate to short stories?
I’m happy to report that The Angel of Rome and Other Stories is distinctively Walter-esque, with captivating, very human characters written about with warm affection.
The title story, The Angel of Rome, is the longest and, perhaps, the sweetest. Jack Rigel is a
shy, sheltered twenty-one-year-old, in Europe for the first time, with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to study Latin at the Vatican.
It’s not that Jack is really a Latin scholar, but he has a vision
to remake myself into a new Jack Rigel. To transform shy, unworldly Nebraska Jack, still in the navy-chinos-and-red-polo uniform of his parochial high school, into Continental Jack: dashing, sexy, a mysterious expat writer and scholar.
I could practically see this New Jack Rigel — sitting all day in cafes, sipping espresso in dark sunglasses and the black leather coat he bought with what he intriguingly called his ‘rather small inheritance’, quoting Sartre and Nietzsche, smoking Muratti cigarettes like he owned the company.
The reality is that Jack is overwhelmed in Latin class, has no money for cafes, and might need to sell his beloved leather coat to afford a flight home. One lonely night he stumbles into a film shoot, starring the gorgeous Italian actress Angelina Amadio and a B-list American star. This could easily be played for laughs — Angelina, the Italian whose only American movie became a joke because of her heavy accent, Ronnie/Sam, the American who’s hoping to jumpstart his career with a European job, and Jack, the naive and hapless Latin student. But Walter is a generous author, and all the characters are treated with kindness. The reader feels Angelina’s humiliation after the American movie bombed, Sam’s hopes for a career restart, and Jack’s intense loneliness and small-town ineptitude. The ending, too is realistically mixed — no magical shooting-star resurgence of careers for anyone, but a pleasant acceptance of fate and life changes as each person grows old.
The stories are generally in the first person, and the protagonist’s thoughts are often wryly funny; laughing at the absurdities of life. Jay is the gay son of a father with Alzheimer’s.
I went into a bar near my apartment to pick him up, he raised his glass as I approached. “Another one of these,” he said. I could see he had no idea who I was.
“Dad? I’m not the bartender. It’s Jay. Your son.”
He stared at me. [..] Then: “Why don’t you ever bring girlfriends home?”
So. This was to be our Sisyphean hell — me coming out to my fading father every day for the rest of his life.
It’s as sad as it is funny.
Another entertaining story has a literary twist: an elderly couple is being overheard by a writer. The conversation between the couple — disconnected, cranky, retro-conservative (“She’s a lesbian? I thought she was just plain!”) and irritable — is chuckle-out-loud amusing.
Of the twelve stories in this collection, almost half have female narrators. Walter does well with his female characters: they are original, distinctive, not at all stereotypical. The focus is on their humanity more than their gender, although their gender has played a natural role in their lives. They are of varying ages. One protagonist is a high school senior with a crush on her fellow waiter, a college kid. ‘Everything Joey said and did that summer was hilarious. ‘ The ending of this story is a wonderful coming-of-age moment:
It’s not like you expected Joey to save the kid. But something about him, standing alone at the shore, clothes completely dry, told you everything you’d ever need to know.
In Mr Voice, Tanya is the 9-year-old daughter of a single mother.
Mother always said that one day my father would return, that he was her “one love”, that what they had was “special”, and these other boyfriends were just “placeholders” until he came back. I didn’t remember my father, and she wouldn’t talk about him — where he lived or who he was — but she’d get this faraway look and make pronouncements like “We’ll always be together” and “He’ll come back.”
It is somewhat ominous when her mother marries a fifty-year-old, balding man with buggy eyes and graying hair. But Claude, immediately, seems rather nice, despite the loud sex, and when her mother runs off with a guitarist, Claude takes over, seamlessly, as a father figure. There are few unpleasant characters in Walters’ books, even though there are no shortage of deadbeat parents and suchlike. He doesn’t ever gloss over their imperfections, but has sympathy for them.
Cancer is also a recurrent theme for many of the characters.
The second week of radiation, she didn’t think it would be so bad, dying.
The stories are not all equally good. Balloons, about a young man who visits Mrs-Ahearn-across-the-street, is somewhat pointless. The Way The World Ends is funny, and in contrast to the other stories, set in an academic environment. It is pleasant reading, but is long, and the mention of climate change has a sense of hopelessness, like the film Don’t Look Up. Perhaps to counter this feeling, the story ends with one of the characters at a gay pride march in Oklahoma yelling ‘You’ve got to give them hope!’
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