Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: A short treatise on short stories in ‘Naked Pueblo’

Friday, Oct. 22, 1999 | 9:56 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-244m

Don't quote me on this, but it seems the short story is enjoying a comeback. This observation derives less from research into current book trends and discussions with experts than from a desperate need for a way to frame a discussion of Mark Jude Piorier's collection "Naked Pueblo" (Harmony Books, $21). "Short story revival" is as good a pretext as any.

But, for what it's worth, I think it's true. Certainly, in the last year or so, collections of short stories have been parked on the "New Arrivals" and "New Paperbacks" tables at my local tome depot in greater numbers than before. Enough that me and FOSL -- Friends of Shelf Life (an honorary designation, no dues required) -- have noticed, and wondered: Where are all these stories being published? You can count on one hand the mainstream magazines that routinely publish fiction: GQ, Esquire, the New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic ... a few others (how many fingers do you have on that hand?) How, we wonder, do short story specialists make a living?

So let's check the credit page of "Naked Pueblo," see where these things first appeared. Green Mountains Review. Coe Review: Annual Experimental Literary Anthology. Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. Laurel Review. In fact, Jane, a second-tier young women's magazine, is Piorier's most impressive credit. I'd guess these 12 stories earned him maybe a mortgage payment and a stack of complimentary copies.

Their mongrel roots actually serve these stories well, though. Take "Monkey Chow," which first appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. It's hard to imagine an aboveground sports publication making room for this bent tale of mountain-climbing, shoplifting and stunted dreams.

In it, three would-be climbers travel from Missouri (where their ascents were limited to the sides of Kmart buildings and day care centers) toward the California climbing mecca of Joshua Tree, flat-broke and in a crappy van. They steal food and siphon gas to keep going. Dumb, futureless, pathetic, they cling to their obsession with climbing to keep their lives from imploding from sheer meaninglessness. (The title refers to the cheap Purina product some climbers in the story eat to conserve money.)

A classier magazine would no doubt have overgroomed this story into respectable blandness, combing out the rough quirks that are its strongest attraction.

Most of Poirier's characters have withered horizons, and find even those are largely unattainable. You know the climbers in "Monkey Chow" will never make it to Joshua Tree intact. Jackpot Wilcox, the protagonist of "Before the Barbecue Hoedown," wants nothing more than to save enough dough to attend college in Tucson, Ariz. (where most of the stories are set). To that end, she takes a job as personal assistant to the city's ninth best Realtor.

However, short of her financial goal, she'll quit, in a fit of principle having to do with a domestic pig and a pool boy. The story ends with her about to take a job at Dairy Queen, the prospect of college dwindling in the distance.

Still, she isn't so beaten down by life that her moral code is dented beyond repair. The characters in "Naked Pueblo" sometimes have that redeeming fragment of grace. Chigger, the red-furred giant of a man who appears in several stories, can be casually cruel to his friends: He traps one in a Porta-potty, shaking it until our narrator is covered with stinking excrement slime. At the same time, he's fiercely loyal. "I knew if she tried to hurt me," the narrator says of Chigger's new girlfriend, "Chigger would kill her." Touching, in its way.

Offsetting the emotional blown fuses and crossed wires of his characters, Poirier supplies his stories with an appealing, funny, surrealistic edge. Just enough to remind readers how stone weird everyday life can be. "He's not a pet," one of the neighbors in the story "Cul-de-sacs" says of her chimp. "He's been socialized with humans and thinks he's our child. We treat him as such." (Sometimes I have the opposite problem with my kids.)

So maybe the short story is indeed undergoing a revival, or perhaps we here at Shelf Life need to get out of the bookstore more, get a life. Either way, you have to be thankful for whatever publishing forces gathered this particular volume from its far-flung, obscure sources and put it on shelves.

Reading list

Esquire, November 1999: Want to feel better about yourself? Pick up Esquire's "Genius Issue" and read Mike Sager's four-part profile of people with phenomenal IQs. Top brain here is Christopher Michael Langan. IQ? One hundred-ninety-five. Particle physicist, you're thinking, or research geneticist -- theoretical mathematician, maybe, or Internet pioneer.

Try bouncer.

He lives in Long Island, N.Y., in a tiny apartment overlooking a heavy-equipment yard, and pulls in six grand a year. To flatter himself that he's not wasting his immense gift, Langan works on some crackpot "Theory of Everything," but what becomes quickly clear is that the humblest, dumbest member of the Shelf Life staff -- that is, me -- has a more enviable life.

Elsewhere in the issue: The always funny David Sedaris takes an IQ test, with shockingly disappointing results ("There are cats that weigh more than my IQ score"). Cosmologist Alan Guth -- author of something like a theory of everything, non-crackpot variety -- is profiled. And there's a "genius test." I'd reveal my score, but I don't want to, you know, be swarmed by Mensa talent scouts.

Outside, November 1999: This month's top story is a compelling true-crime account of last spring and summer's murders in and near Yosemite National Park. You probably remember the news accounts: Three female tourists murdered, followed later by a fourth woman.

Elsewhere in the issue: A funny piece about the state of American Boy Scouting and "Outside's Snow Report 2000," a fat assemblage of skiing tips and location scouting reports.

Mark your calendar

"In Nevada" author David Thomsen -- who, when he's not doing the Nevada thing is a big-time film journalist and critic -- will be at a book-signing at 7 p.m., Nov. 12, in the Borders Book Shop at Rainbow and Lake Mead boulevards. Call 638-7866.

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