A Good Short Story and A Great Short Story: The Professor vs General Mouse
Our college literature professors teach us that a good short story has a strong descriptive narrative about one event or moment in time. There are plenty of Hemingway short stories that can prove that theory.
But occasionally a writer can break that mold and you get Dorothy Parker’s The Big Blonde which seems to capture a novel-sized life in a few pages.
I read two short stories last week that also go for the ‘Hail Mary’ pass in terms of story arc. Roberto Bolano has a story in Harper’s Magazine this month The Ruin of Amalfitano (log-in required) which manages to track the downfall of a writing professor (Amalfitano) once he has met a young writing student named Padillo, as they share a demolition derby ride through life.
The other story is General Mouse, a tour de force written by Mark Zipoli. This story sets out to cover the life of a man who we meet bemoaning the super-sized dietary habits of Americans as he works keeping a Los Angeles Farmers' Market clean of garbage and trash.
The story unravels General Mouse’s amazing personal history overlaid with remembrances of things past from our shared history of Vietnam.
Bolano’s story is the ‘good’ story here, and is as wild as we would except from the author of The Savage Detectives. The highs, lows, sex and drugs of a Bolano story are on display as the trajectory of the professor's life changes after meeting the student who changes everything. It is a richly drawn character study that captures the fallout as the men's passions collide and mix to create a toxic nectar of which both men drink.
It is the scope of the story that is impressive. The reverberations of the friendship of these two men’s lives require Bolano to write of the aftermath of the final parting of Amalfitano and Padillo on the other minor characters in the story. We too, as readers are left changed after sharing the experience of their lives, and we are left wanting to know more.
The ‘great’ story here, is General Mouse, a story different in every way possible from Bolano’s except for the impact and the scope of what it attempts to achieve, a man's life story.
Mr. Zipoli manages to create a complete biography of a very complex, secretive and important person in the short story form, and we are lacking nothing at the end. We have experienced an epic novel.
General Mouse, whose real name is Anh Dung Tran, a 70 year old worker at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, empties the overflow of trash and garbage throughout the day passing judgment on the customers as he slips in and out of memories from his past; memories intertwined with the history of his home country.
...Nobody knew that he’d read history in Hanoi and studied at the Sorbonne; that he’d taken courses at Moscow University and learned Russian, English, French, and Chinese; that he read maps and had built bridges and swing traps, and dug tunnels; and launched spiked tree trunks into the air against the French and the Americans.
Nobody knew that he’d helped to make a French regiment disappear without a trace in the forests of Cao Bang province. The French colonialists, they never put their backs into it, he thought; we were just savages to those heirs of Voltaire and Danton...
All the revolutionary promises, betrayals and failures experienced by the East vs West satellite nations of the Cold War are played out in the mind, minefields and on the back of Anh Dung Tran.
The writing is truly mesmerizing as we are swept through a biographical, psychological and historical journey of General Mouse.
Tran's present and past, haunt the Farmers’ Market. This is truly a great American short Story.
Mark Zipoli is the author the novel The Long Habit of Living as well as other short stories. Please look him up, he may not be as easy to find as the ghost of Roberto Bolano, but his work is rich in texture and nuance of character. Mr. Zipoli is an author who lets you into the minds of his characters and what they share with the reader is worth volumes.
Review courtesy of http://derosaworld.typepad.com
