Frog City Updike
never would’ve been without Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, the book that showed me just how loose I could get
with form. — Arthur Graham, Big
Al’s Books and Pals
One of the words I use too often in reviews is
“interesting,” but I never really make it clear whether a particular word
piques my interest or holds it. It’s the same with “nice,” which I also
overuse; nice can have negative connotations; the last thing your wife wants to
hear when she walks in wearing a new outfit is, “You look nice, Dear.” Even
more confusing I would expect is when something gets referred to as “nice and
interesting.” Frog City Updike–the place, not the book–sounds like a nice,
interesting place. I’m not sure I’d want to live there but if I did I can see
myself running across interesting things and saying, “Oh, that’s nice,” or vice
versa.
Short story collections are a bugger to review. The problem
usually is finding the common thread. Why does the author think that these
particular stories, in this particular order, work? The ones I find I enjoy
best are books like
The
Next Stop is Croy and other stories where the stories all revolve
around a single family or
Ugly to
Start With where the stories are all set in a particular town and
retain the same narrator.
Arthur
Graham’s
Frog City Updike (Amazon,
174 pages) works because all the stories bar two are set within the borders of
the fictional town of Frog City Updike. As for the two exceptions, one is set
in Ireland and another in Frog City Updike Heaven. Some have first person
points of views, others third; there’s even a couple of letters employing a
second person narrative; the protagonists vary but they all are Frog City
Updike-ites and that is what binds them together; their idiosyncratic take on
life. The closest comparison I can think of is the quirky American TV series Portlandia.
Anyway, this collection works.
Astute readers will have noticed in the last paragraph that
I mentioned that Frog City Updike was a town. This is not a typo. I’ll let the
author explain:
[W]eighing in with just 7,886 yearlong residents, it
would be more accurate to call the place Frog Town Updike. But, as is the case
with all such misnomers, the fact of the inaccuracy is not as important as the
truth of it. Whenever the place was first referred to as Frog City Updike, or
whoever first referred to it that way - these questions are purely academic.
For those who call it home, Frog City Updike simply is what it is. Frog City
Updike is just what the town has always been called, and since the name stuck
as well as it did, no one really sees much point in trying to change it on a
technicality now.
The Updike connection also requires some explanation:
[T]here has never been any family, business, or public
office with the name Updike listed anywhere in the local phone book. One can
imagine how hard this has made it to look up the local post office, or anything
else for that matter!
Okay it’s not much of an explanation. But it is a fact.
However bizarre. There are frogs, just not as many as one might expect to
warrant the inclusion of their existence in the name of the place.
To be perfectly honest, there are only about two hundred
or so in the entire area, and most if not all of them are concentrated around
the small pond at the shady heart of Frog City Updike City Park. Quite rare is
it to see a frog anywhere beyond this pond or its immediate environs–at least
one that hasn’t been flattened by a car or carried off and pecked apart by a
bird somewhere. But the frogs of Frog City Updike–confined as they are to their
pond at the centre of Frog City Updike City Park–they don’t much complain about
their lot in life.
So that’s Frog City Updike. Having read no Updike I can’t
say that the writing style reminded me in any way of John Updike although
Wikipedia tells me that he also wrote a great deal about American small towns
and probably published far more short story collections than most winners of
the Pulitzer Prize have. The author bio at the back of the book says that
Arthur Graham works “in a slipstream, surrealist style that has been compared
to that of William S. Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” but as I’ve managed to
get through the last fifty-three years without reading either of them I can’t
comment on any similarities to their work either. (Note to self: need to read
more American writers.) Having only read the three quotes above, although not
in the order in which I presented them, the author I thought about was Richard
Brautigan (which shows that I have read at least one American writer) and one particular book came to
mind: In Watermelon Sugar. In an old
post on Arthur’s blog I was pleased to see that he’d also realised that
this was the kind of book “Brautigan might’ve enjoyed if he hadn’t blown his
brains out all those years ago.” Which is a very Brautigan-esque way of putting
it, don’t you think?
Now having read the above, which, as I’ve said was all that
I’d read when I reached that conclusion, you may or may not agree with that
assessment, assuming, of course, that you’re familiar with Brautigan’s work,
but as I pressed through the collection I only found more evidence to underline
that initial determination. Brautigan’s naive style of writing is not something
one comes across very often. Indeed the last book that reminded me of him was
called Naive. Super by the Norwegian
author Erlend Loe which I enjoyed immensely.
The majority of the stories in Frog City Updike could be described as flash fiction; many only last
for a couple of pages and as the paragraphs are mostly short and the font is on
the generous side (I was working from a PDF mind) there is certainly more white
space than most short stories contain resulting in proportionately fewer words
per page that one might expect. The net effect is that it is a nice book to
read. This is not a thing I tend to say about most books of flash fiction where
the stories jump all over the shop but since all the stores are set in Frog
City Updike or involve Frog City Updike-ites you feel as if you’re getting to
know the town a little at a time. It’s an interesting town. Needless to say
it’s not a real town. The title came from Arthur’s wife:
My wife suggested Frog City Updike as a nonsensical title
for the novella I was working on last year. Though completely inappropriate for
that particular book, it was far too good a title to just throw away! Frog City
Updike basically wrote itself around these three words, which is why it’s
dedicated to Jayna, who provided that initial spark.
[…]
For Frog City Updike…whenever I felt like working I would
imagine this nondescript town, theoretically in rural America somewhere - a
place that served as a sort of microcosm for the larger world, along with all
of the people, places, and things in it. From there, I would cast about for
interesting characters and situations, transporting them to this rather
amorphous locale and infusing them with my own observations and experiences. In
so doing, I found it easy to incorporate a wide variety of unpublished material
I’d been sitting on for a while, stuff that likely never would’ve seen the
light of day if I hadn’t taken such an essentially open approach. – The Indie Spotlight
I can see the total sense in this because a number of the
stories don’t work especially well on their own but gain strength from being
incorporated in a group like this.
A number of the stories in Frog City Updike come from a group whose connection to Frog City
Updike is tenuous to say the least. The first, entitled “Hitler’s Bad Day”
begins as follows:
Hello. My name is Arthur Graham. If you’re reading my
book, Frog City Updike, then you can call me Frog City Updike Arthur Graham.
Incidentally, how are you liking my little book so far? I
hope you are liking it well!
If you like this book, then you may like this other thing
I wrote–a short story entitled “Hitler’s Bad Day.”
HITLER’S BAD DAY
By Arthur Graham
A short man paced aimlessly around the small underground
room, stopping here and there to straighten a wall hanging or rearrange the
items on a table. Each time he passed the ornamental mirror above
the fireplace, which he did with some frequency, he paused for a
moment to examine his moustache and frown at it. The barber had cut
it too short, he thought.
Hitler was having a bad day.
The others are “TV and the Internet,” “Nice Description,”
“And So It Came to Be” and the longest story in the collection, “No One Drinks
Tea Anymore” which, if I’d read any books by Tom Robbins I might say reminded
me of Tom Robbins in that the protagonist in the story is a teacup. (Note to
self: add Tom Robbins to the list of American authors you need to get round
to.) None of the other stories in the book involve sentient inanimate objects
although to be fair to the teacup she does not remain immobile and indeed makes
her big bid for freedom juiced up on nicotine of all things towards the end of
the story. There is a talking frog and a chatty Loch Ness Monster in the story
which is set in Ireland although he does explain what the Loch Ness Monster
isn’t doing in his native Scotland. For me, though, the standout story was the
one about the teacup. I suspect its length was the reason. It has time to
develop the characters. An extract:
Teacup wasn’t dumb. She was fairly smart as far as
inanimate objects went, but her knowledge of current fashion trends was sadly
lacking. In any event, she was used to having her suggestions ignored.
What she did know about the world outside the diner was
largely limited to what people around her let slip. Other objects were rarely
much help at filling in the gaps because each had their own geographic
blinders. For example, in the kitchen, Whisk had no idea what a chicken was. He
could tell you every minute detail about an individual chicken egg, but for all
he knew they grew on vines.
The problem was actually quite simple: Most of them
simply lacked any general context in which to place their very specific
knowledge. That’s what happens when you spend the majority of your time stuck
in a sink, in a drawer, or in a cupboard. These days Teacup was spending more
and more of her time in the cupboard.
No one drinks tea anymore, she would often lament.
There is some attempt at continuity and characters from one
story do reappear in another, especially Frog City Updike Arthur Graham. Frog
City Updike Sheila and Tony appear in “The Jean Jacket”, “On Your Side,” “It
Was Just that Kind of Vacation” (for me the weakest story in the book as it’s
set in Ireland and having written a book set in Ireland and also not being
Irish–Arthur hails from the north woods of Michigan; I hail from Glasgow city
centre–I know just how hard it is to get those telltale details right), “A
Scene From Frog City Updike Tony’s Deathbed” and the last story, “Heaven,” in
which everyone has a cameo and I nearly missed her because her name is spelled
“Shelia.” (Considering Arthur pays his bills editing medical textbooks for a
small publishing company in Salt Lake City, tsk, tsk.)
Some of the stories have a surreal edge to them. In “Making
Relationships Work” the unnamed narrator is sitting in Frog City Updike Public
Library when he sees a “young hip couple” come in:
I could tell they were young due to their solid, slender
physiques, smooth skin, and overall lively demeanor. They were hip obviously
because they were dressed in the latest fashions of the time, which at that
time consisted of an all-black winter ensemble accentuated by bright pastel
accessories. As for how I could tell they were a couple, well, there were two of
them present.
But the next time he notices them they’ve mysteriously aged
and their relationship also seems to have, well, depreciated. And they smell:
I tried to pretend that I hadn’t been thinking intently
about their personal lives, which was easy now that I noticed their combined
effluvium of French fry grease, cigarette smoke, and mildewed undergarments.
No explanation is forthcoming but the narrator notices the
book the woman is carrying: MAKING RELATIONSHIPS WORK and he proceeds to mull
over in his mind what he might learn from this pair. He realises that the
experience has taught him valuable lessons:
1) It takes more than the latest styles to make a person
hip,
2) it takes more than hipness to make a person young, and
3) it takes more than two persons present to make a
couple.
Others stories have a profound simplicity. In “Bruised
Bananas and Broken Bones” we learn what has happened to reduce Frog City Updike
Dr. Robertson from being a successful and wealthy medical practitioner to
having to spend his nights under a Frog City Updike bridge “with nothing but a
sleeping bag, a rucksack, and a small wooden crate he’d turned upside down to
use as a table.” But rather than being a tale of failure the story ends on a
surprising positive note:
It had given the former Mrs. Robertson great pleasure to
see her former husband left penniless, but what she didn’t know was how well an
old hobo doctor could live in exchange for giving free medical advice and
setting the occasional broken bone.
A new young doctor now taken over the practice but he still
hadn’t taken down the sign that reads “Frog City Updike Dr. Robertson’s Family
Clinic.”
Whenever the young doctor finally takes down his old
sign, Dr. Robertson decides, he will reclaim it from the Frog City Updike municipal
dump and set it up beneath his bridge.
None of the stories are especially heavy. Not even the one
about Hitler. In fact the political correctness of writing stories about
someone like Hitler is addressed in a later story:
I am not nor have I ever been a Nazi sympathizer, Hitler
lover, or Holocaust denier/apologist. I’ll tell you a few other things that I’m
not: 1) Simple-minded to the point where I am unable to conceptualize on
multiple levels. After all, it is not hard to imagine Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
tossing a paper cup out the window of a moving vehicle, or Mahatma Gandhi
verbally abusing his wife, so why is it so hard to imagine Adolph Hitler doing
anything other than incinerating Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals and
intellectuals? 2) Ignorant to the point where I equate the mere reference of a
word/name with the wholehearted support of everything associated with it, and
3) Sensitive to the point where I allow my ignorance in these basic matters to
upset me to such a degree that I feel compelled to write asinine letters to
anyone who will read them and possibly respond.
We have a grandmother and granddaughter exchanging letters,
there’s a woman who can’t sleep for her husband snoring, an overly-forthright
drama coach, a boxer who becomes a legend because of his glass jaw, a group of
gypsies who seem to pass around the same kid while they beg for money, there’s
some debate about why bunnies don’t lay eggs (personally I’ve never understood
what either eggs or rabbits have to do with Easter) and there’s even a story
where you can decide what happens next; remember those?
All in all it adds up to a rather charming read. As Arthur
puts it himself:
It won’t keep your children or grandchildren nearly as
riveted as the average Disney film, but you could probably read it aloud to
them without overly censoring the material. It retains a lot of the same quirks
that made its predecessor such a mixed bag, but it’s executed with virtually no
sex, violence, or dark, demented broodings to speak of. Very whimsical in both
structure and tone. Big
Al’s Books and Pals
I have nothing to add.
You can read a lengthy extract from the book
here.
