Reviews for Typical

The average rating for Typical based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-01 00:00:00 Jorge Herrada Willie Stargell, prodigious hitter of home runs and occasional philosopher, once considered that every baseball game begins with the home plate umpire reaching an arm over the shoulder of a squatting catcher, pointing toward the pitcher, and ordering, in a melodic voice, "PLAAAAAAAAY BALL!" "He doesn't say, 'Work Ball'," Stargell smiled. Reading Padgett Powell, I am reminded that there is wordplay, but no wordwork. Twenty-three short stories, some long and some very short, just two or three pages. Some bizarre, but not bizarro. Some tending to magic realism.* But all make the reader pause from time to time at the fun of putting words together, even if sometimes they originate in the darkest corners of the mind. These guys: Try this, from 'Mr. Nefarious': Mr. Nefarious smiled, and only when smiling was he able to do anything else. When smiling he could also do nothing, but when not smiling he could do nothing but not smile. Or how about one sentence, this from 'Wait': Spavined, clavicular, and cow-hocked, with an air not of malice but simply of a leaden determination that seemed to come up from the hard, baking ground itself on which it stood, chained, confined, gravitate to the orbit of earth depressed, moonlike, and polished by its five-foot circular diurnal traveling, looking forward with a low-lidded not scowl or glare but just look, the eyes half-lidded and half-rolled, suggesting not insolence or calculation or even sentience but a kind of pride--rear-axled and log-chained for a lifetime to a hot powdery hole in which it is its fate to consider its chances of fighting, the rare times not chained, for its very life--a profound self-esteem that says simply, I am here, you see that I am here, what need to look you in the eye: the bulldog bit the corncob truncate. 'Mr. Irony' is a Tim Burton-like character in his eponymous story, but then he renounces irony in the very next story, aptly (not ironically) named 'Mr. Irony Renounces Irony'. Having given up Irony, Mr. Irony goes to the unemployment office. He's denied benefits because he had had no employer, had not been laid off or fired. What was more ironic than getting paid for not working only if you could prove someone had deemed you unsuitable for working? Powell, when not being ironical, can also serve up truisms. From 'Proposition': You can't ramble around the woods in your truck going to fish camp without drinking. And from 'Texas': If a boy is afraid of the dark and wets the bed, try hard, very hard, not to comment in any language. He will grow to put you softly in your grave. In one of the weirder stories, 'The Modern Italian', which I recommend you read last, Mario Moscalini, a cab-driver, picks up a very fat Frenchman: Mario had no idea how to contend with a large Frenchman who did not care if you insulted Jerry Lewis. The idea even frightened him a little. One might as well be dealing with a Moroccan, or worse. A Frenchman unprepared to defend Jerry Lewis might do anything at all, because he would be a man who was empty inside, perhaps not even a man in the normal sense but a kind of alien--an anti-homme, as he thought the French might put it. I could go on and on.** But I will end with my favorite story: 'Labove and Son'. Labove, see, was a teacher somewhere else, where he inappropriately 'touched' the Varnier girl. For all of five seconds. She was thirteen. He fled to El Campo, Texas, married and had 'son'. When son was in high school, he learns about what his father did, reading about it in a book of all things. He sorta asks his Dad about it in the context of telling his Dad he wants to change his name to Bob Love II. The dad, Labove, likes to sit on a flat chair, tilted back, with the front two legs exactly two inches off the floor.*** He let the chair settle down to all fours, then tilted back again, a rare full three inches off the ground. And when he finally speaks, in one of those defining father-son moments, he says this: What she was like, I need Italian to tell you. Change your name. __________________________ *By the way, has anyone else considered that magic realism is an oxymoron. Dr. Phil, I think, has just published his fourth DIET book. Setting aside the fact that you should be able to say everything about dieting in your first volume, why -WHY, WHY, WHY- I ask are these books not in the Magic Realism section of the library? **You mean you haven't? ***Try it. Highly recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-07 00:00:00 Thomas Cope This collection of short stories made me realize that I already know all stories and the fact that there are a lot of them written and still being written is because stories now all differ only by the way they are being presented, like there are a lot of ways rice can be cooked, rice with garlic, rice with fish, fried, boiled, paella, noodled, etc. The carrier piece here, Typical, is what assaults your brain when you start reading and it is nothing but the same stuff Kafka would have written, I mean idea-wise, though much more modern and much more difficult. It is like rice mixed with pebbles, if ever there is such a dish somewhere in China, so it is difficult to swallow and digest although the story is as old as the hills. What I mean is, why have rice with pebbles when rice can be pure or mixed with other edible stuff and can be enjoyed without difficulty? This is therefore different, but not much. Forgettable, and quite certainly.