Review: American Male (A Review of All Around They're Taking Down the Lights by Adam Berlin)

By Hugh Blanton

Short story collections run the risk of dilettantism, they're often written by authors who lack the discipline to complete a novel—or worse—written by those who harbor the false belief that short stories are simply little novels. The short story is the grist of the workshop mill, producing hopeful aspirants slugging it out in the minor leagues waiting for that fabled call-up: "The Novel." In reality short stories and novels bear scant resemblance to each other, in a short story the author has a limited canvas and needs the skill to transfer a great amount of meaning to a small space. Whereas novels are sometimes rife with little plot holes that escape the reader's notice, a plot hole in a short story would stand out like a red zit on a nose. Even legends like Carver and Cheever would win some and lose some. Here we have a collection without a clunker in the bunch.

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All Around They're Taking Down the Lights is the debut short story collection from Adam Berlin. Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, these fifteen stories are about men—their dreams, their relationships, their flaws; each story showing the underside of male tropes. The characters here are restless men moving from woman to woman, failing actors, even a fraudulent karate instructor. Berlin's prose is stripped to its strong firm bones and there's an influence of Hemingway without being an imitation of Hemingway (Berlin can compose a good long sentence without even a hint of discursiveness). Hemingway, being a minimalist, hoped that through the irony of leaving out details some greater insight would be gleaned. Berlin's use of voice and scene is where the reader gets their insight here and is the mark of a true story teller at heart. These stories are temperamentally new without being in sync with current fiction trends. Themes, motifs, and characters reappear throughout the collection—there are two failing wannabe actors whose idea of perfecting their craft is public pranks and juvenile hijinx including surreptitiously placing a chunk of NYPD police horse droppings in a truffle display at Teuscher Chocalates.

 

Berlin was awarded the 2005 Ferro-Grumley Award for his novel Belmondo Style. He's got four novels under his belt going back to 2000 and currently teaches writing at CUNY. If John Cheever was an "enchanted realist," Berlin is an unaffected realist. In Cheever's 1978 short story collection he chronicled upstate New York life—its Waspiness, its cocktail hours, its suburban affairs. Berlin's characters cook on hotplates in tiny hotel rooms, get blind drunk in dive bars, have hookups via online dating apps. The stories in All Around They're Taking Down the Lights acknowledge both the profound and the absurd to the detriment of neither. An extra leaving the set after a day of filming looks into the eyes of a famous actor "looking to see if I can learn something, something about how he is where he is, but I already know..." In another story a character who has a shyness for using public restrooms is preparing for a prison term that he is to start in three months by having his girlfriend observe him toileting. (She's an encouraging coach.) A good author like Berlin can make us care about a bad (in a moral sense) character—talent finds the humanity behind the inhuman. The stories in this collection are all originals—the brooding presence of previous short story master's ghosts that is present in so many collections today is not felt here.

 

The longest story in the collection is "The Aloha State," and it's also its most bizarre. We have a couple arriving in Hawaii, newly married but not on their honeymoon. The wife will be working in the hotel room some days while the husband surfs and swims. After her first day of work they meet for dinner at 7 in a sushi restaurant. When he asks her about her day she says that her client needed constant attention. She also tells him that she has one more session that night and the client has a shoe fetish. "I'll be done at ten," she says and gives him suggestions for how to spend his time until she finishes. Exactly what kind of work is she doing here? Berlin shows his expertise in short story creation, revealing events and characters a little at a time from that large space onto the small canvas and justifying the anticipation provoked.

 

If Guy de Maupassant is the father of the modern short story, Ernest Hemingway is its disreputable Uncle. When it comes to writing short stories Hemingway said, "Have the guts of a burglar and no conscience except to writing." Berlin seems a natural here. In the story "Makeit" two aspiring actors practice their craft at every opportunity: 

 

           "We staged fights in the street, brutal and real looking. Whole crowds gathered, watching us beat each other, until we both stood and took our bows. One time a cop took Curt down, nightstick against neck, and I had to explain we were just fucking around. I told the cop it was for an acting class, an exercise. He told us to do our exercises somewhere else."

 

These two also recite Brando lines while drunk in the back of a cab; they crash auditions without having SAG cards. The brawny engine-room prose here is boiled, cooked down, and fermented into white lightning. Berlin's humor and noir are reflections of the spirit that animates an Elmore Leonard novel.

 

When the Swedish Academy awarded Alice Munro the Nobel in 2013 it showed the world still cares about short stories. In their citation they said Munro was a master who could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages." Alex Keegan, writing for Eclectica said, "In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels." That's the driving force and task of the short story writer and it's also where so many fail. Berlin's virtuosity, much like Anton Chekov's, lies not in just what he does, but what in he does not do. He avoids the pitfalls of 'parading and announcing' by 'embedding and revealing' which is precisely how the masters of the short story capture the essence of a novel in just a few pages.

 

Past Tartt First Fiction Award winners include MO Walsh whose book The Big Door Prize was adapted into an Apple TV+ series and Tara Mantel who the Minneapolis Star Tribune said "belongs in the realm of great regional writers such as William Faulkner and Wright Morris." After a long stretch as a novelist Berlin has raised the curtain on his short stories, no collar or leash, which is what's expected of our short story writers. The young short story writers are imitating the old (or worse, punctuating their sentences with emojis: see Honor Levy), the old are repeating themselves, here we get hefty originality. Berlin's characters in All Around They're Taking Down the Lights swagger, drink, fight, and fail—and then detox themselves with vigorous workouts the next morning to do it all over again.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5