DISCOVERIES
Say That to My Face
David Prete
W.W. Norton: 192 pp., $23.95
“When you’re miserable you have two choices: You can change the scenery or change your relationship to the scenery. Of course, changing your relationship to the scenery entails looking into yourself.... So I came up with something much simpler. Get the hell out of Yonkers.” This is what the young Italian boy/man in this collection of stories is trying to do. But the memories and lessons of his childhood keep pulling him back, the moments he never fully understood as a child: his parents’ divorce, his mother’s sadness, the four houses he and his sister lived in (grandparents’, aunt’s, father’s and father’s girlfriend’s). Not to mention the crazy rumbling of New York in the near distance: racism, gangs, bullies, street fights, Little League and Son of Sam. I love the words in these stories: “nothin’,” “gonna,” “whaddaya.” And the landmarks of childhood in New York, from the Yankees to the big blue whale in the American Museum of Natural History. But Prete is especially good at creating indelible characters: Frank Gianguzzi, whose “term of endearment for everyone was ‘coog,’ from the Italian cugino, meaning ‘cousin’ ”; Ray, the gift-bearing convict who dates the narrator’s mother after her divorce; and even the prostitute whose happiest moment in life was “the time she saw Santa Claus.”
*
In the Shadow
of the Strip
Las Vegas Stories
Edited by Richard Logsdon, Todd Moffett and Tina D. Eliopulos
University of Nevada Press:
160 pp., $16 paper
“Aside from his gambling, things had been fine,” thinks Luther as he tries to leave Las Vegas, creditors in hot pursuit. And dang if he don’t turn around and jump back in. In many of these stories, we see the cycle a character is caught in, like the repeating codes of DNA: They can’t get out of Vegas. There’s a lot of glare in the stories: lights, failure, fast food and a magician who loses a woman’s husband in his disappearing act. As in many stories set in Vegas, ungainly stepchild of Los Angeles, there’s very little nature. Instead, the authors give us a moonscape of terms from that culture: double-down card, tokes, discard rack, pit boss, fire a hundred at the house, up card and rough hustling. The people and the language they use to describe the games they play (and the guilt they suffer) may change, but Las Vegas never will.
*
My Paris
Gail Scott
Dalkey Archive Press:
136 pp., $12.95 paper
“Maybe already less a traveler. Than a sort of flaneur (of interior!) ... Like simple Journalist. By time of Baudelaire. Anyway sitting on canape. Looking out window. Rain streaking pane. Not having found dream cafe yet. Probably having to leave Faubourg.” “My Paris” is the journal of a Canadian woman who lives for several weeks in a studio in Paris. She is alone but not lonely. In a shorthand numbered entry by entry, she records the conversation going on in her mind, a female Leopold Bloom in a city she loves and hates as much as he loved and hated Dublin. Like Bloom, she talks with the authors in her head. Her points of reference are Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Victor Hugo, Colette and Walter Benjamin. Her observations tumble out in a jumpy, breathless vernacular that seems natural by about the third page. Natural and familiar; the absence of punctuation seems downright true to the language of thought: “Light streaming across table. Cafe doors open. But how come no square of chocolate. On saucer by graceful little cup.” The entries remind a reader of a painter’s journal. (I am thinking of Bonnard’s famous journal in which most days were noted with “pluie” or “beau le matin,” especially on days when he created the most astonishing paintings.) Gail Scott shows how writing and literature live beneath the surface of the skin, more raw than sentimental: “Last day. Angry pink-grey dawn. Visible down curved white rue de Grenelle. Over lovely asymmetrical steeples of Saint-Sulpice ... Drastic headache. Coffee withdrawal.”