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Notes from the (Bibliographic) Underground

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Wendy Robards, October 27, 2008 (view all comments by Wendy Robards)
Christopher Meeks stories are full of people who push through the obstacles of life and overcome their deepest fears in order to find joy in living. Months and Seasons, Meeks second collection of short stories is a delightful book which introduces the reader to characters who are ordinary, but in their ordinariness remind us of the common threads which bind people together.

In the story Catalina, we meet a man who is traveling to Catalina via a catamaran. He is grieving the loss of his son.

'For the full hour-ride, Daunus sat outside, looking rearward into the gray wake. At one point, a white baseball cap landed in the wake. Someone lost it. His chest felt constricted. Breathing was hard. he’d given this country everything, including now his son. -From Months and Seasons, Catalina, page 37-'

He meets a woman on the boat who optimistically tells him that Catalina is ‘like a persimmon - unexpected fruit on a naked tree.‘ The man’s discovery that there is still beauty in the world, despite his devastating loss, allows him to go forward into his life. This simple story is an example of the hope which Meeks infuses into all of his stories as his characters confront their fears of aging, mortality and the sometimes insurmountable challenges of relationships.

In some stories, the characters must battle their own inner demons to make sense of the world and their place within it. In A Shoe Falls, Max must evaluate his marriage to Alice - a woman who clutters the house with her shoes. He wakes from a dream about owing a cab driver $150,000 and thinks:

'…if the ride was getting so expensive and monotonous, why hadn’t he asked the cab driver to let him off? Why hadn’t he done more than sit there, bouncing in the back seat pondering his sanity? He was a passive man, goddamn it. -From Months and Seasons, A Shoe Falls, page 72-'

Max’s inner journey in this story looks at how one man (who could be any of us) examines his “dreams” in the face of his reality. Will he be able to overcome regret for what he has does not have in order to accept what is?

My favorite story of the collection is Breaking Water - which opens with a supermodel awakening from open heart surgery. Merrill appears to have lost everything of importance in her life - her career as a model, her marriage, and her vision of who she is. She must begin again and turns toward art school as a possible answer. Merrill’s story is one of falling down and getting back up again; of finding hope in the midst of despair. It touched me.

And this is perhaps the strength of the collection - in showing us the lives of these ordinary characters, Meeks exposes what is human in all of us. Who has never felt life was not living up to expectation? Or looked at the years unraveling and wondered if we had the time to do everything we wanted? Or experienced a loss so big that hope seemed irretrievable? Or found our fears so encompassing we felt paralyzed to overcome them? Meeks explores these ideas with humor and sensitivity, and creates a collection hard to put down.

For those readers who love short stories, Months and Seasons is a must read. Highly recommended.

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posthumouser, September 2, 2008 (view all comments by posthumouser)
This is Christopher Meeks second book of short stories and I'm sorry that I haven't read his first, which was an award winning collection. I read these 11 stories through the first time for pleasure and it was that. I like them a lot. The characters here, whether humourous, tragic, or mildly absurd are likeable, believable, and not always predictable. Like ordinary people, but with quirks that make them memorable. I haven't had a collection of short stories stay with me as vividly for quite some time. Even better, when I looked back through them I realized that there's not a weak one in the bunch. The author clearly edited himself, choosing and arranging this group of stories carefully. I've always preferred longer short stories so I wasn't surprised that "The Sun is a Billard Ball" at 32 pages in length would appeal to me. Or the 25 page "Breaking Water". But even "Catalina" at only 3 pages is a solid and emotionally powerful account of a man's unexpressed grief . I read it several times because what the author doesn't say is as telling as what he does. This is the sign of a good writer. In the first of these three stories, the uncertainties and fears of impending illness and diagnosis are palpable, the tension is familiar and real. In the third a Greek American man, advised by an acquaintance to spend the day on Catalina Island, is angry and judgmental until " he is surprised to see that the dry hills leaping from the water were like the Chora Sfakion in Crete. His friend must have known."

There's a wide range in age and emotional experience of his characters. Whether it's a seven year old who's afraid of water in the more lyrical "The Wind Just Right " or a seventy-eight year old playwright losing his home and life's work to wildfires in" The Old Topanga Incident", Meeks is capable of seeing and writing from very different perspectives. He shows great versitility too by writing in the voice that most suits each story. His use of the first person singular for the main character of "The Holes In My Door" lets us into the depression and obsessive fears of this recently seperated man who's slipping into paranoid behaviour. Any other perspective would not have had the same power. The use of the second person in the "Topango" story work well too. "You open the door" to shouting firemen,"you run down two flights of stairs", "you grab the play, the only copy", "you wonder whether you can make it through this". The urgency and loss is keenly felt by the reader, it's perfect.

I especially enjoyed the title story "Months and Seasons". The main character is determined that the love of his life will have the name of one of the months or seasons of the year. He won't even date someone who doesn't fit the bill. This tale about putting limits on our own fate is touching and funny. When a woman at a party introduces herself as "August" I laughed out loud. Meeks creates believable female characters too as in the final story "Breaking Water", where a model must reshape her entire life after heart surgery. Her inability to get pregnant causes her husband to abandon her, but not until after she has recovered from surgery. He doesn't want to look bad after all. We are rooting for her at every new turn in her life. This is a great collection of stories that I look forward to reading again. Highly recommended.

There's icing on the cake here too with "The Hand", an excerpt from "The Brightest Moon of the Century" at the end of the book. This novel in the form of related short stories will cover 30 years in the life of a young Minnesotan named Edward. The first of these stories made me want to know more about what happens to Edward. Given this writer's gifted sense of storytelling, I expect this new book will be a winner too.

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Grady Harp, May 24, 2008 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
Christopher Meeks: He just gets better and better

For those readers fortunate enough to have read Christopher Meeks' first short story collection - THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA - and discovered the idiosyncrasies of Meeks' writing style and content, rest assured that this new collection - MONTHS AND SEASONS - not only will not disappoint, but also it will provide further proof that we have a superior writer of the genre in our presence! Meeks is an observer of the human condition, and that does not mean his view is lopsided or focused on only one realm of characters. True, he does create characters that have strangely vulnerable aspects that alter the way they interact with those around them. But in the end, these are people we pass in the street or sit next to on the bus, or notice in the strange places of Southern California like malls, funky parties - or just 'around' the neighborhood or cities. But his strange creations have just the right amount of 'normalcy' that in our eyes could make them part of the unnoticed woodwork: in Meeks' eyes (and pen) they become extraordinary seeds for terrific stories.

In the opening story 'Dracula Slinks into the Night' a dysfunctional couple attends a silly Halloween party where the husband's aversion to dancing leads to a fall that oddly mutates the couple's differences. 'Why not dance?' Meeks writes, 'We're merely blobs of water and minerals procreating to create what? It was a world run over with gas-guzzlers and pollution and cattle prods for semen.' In "The Sun is a Billiard Ball' we watch the interaction of two couples' lives: one couple is dealing with the husband's discovery of bloody stools while the other couple is facing the spectre of HIV testing, and the manner in which their lives intersect is one of the examples of the Chaos Theory. In 'The Holes in My Door' a recently 'separated' man finds gunshot holes in his garage door and reacts by investing in his own gun and shoots himself in the foot - much the way his bonding with his ex-wife (an obsession that colors all of his thoughts) was punctured by his own behavior.

There are other stories of infidelity and the remorse of cheating and regretting. The title story concerns movie extras and their cruising. Cody, the lead character, is looking for the perfect match (such as girls with names like Summer or May). 'Cody believed in belief. He was like the late Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard, except he was working in America on a movie set with giant power cables and topless women. He and Soren were awed by faith. Cody couldn't explain why he believed names were important, for example, but they were. He just knew. There were things beyond science'. In 'The Wind Just Right' Meeks dives into a mother/daughter relationship that has more similarities in fears and phobias than either understands. In 'Breaking Water' we meet fashion model Merrill, post op for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that changes her career options, but delivers other opportunities. '"We're just 'beings toward death', right? Martin Heidegger said we're all looking for an authentic life before the inevitable happens. We're supposed to face death and have a healthy anxiety towards it'."

In excerpting little passages from this book this reader hopes to convey the spectrum of experience gained from reading Christopher Meeks. He writes with a blend of hilarious humor, significant angst, philosophical bents in the manner many people inhabit 'beliefs' to continue their lives in this somewhat discombobulated world, and offers us fresh views of ordinary people whose lives for even a few moments become extraordinary. Other readers will find personal favorite stories and passages - it is that kind of book, one that has little chunks of life to which we call all relate and find both kindred spirits and avoidable folks with suggestions on how to cope with them. There are twelve stories that expand the spectrum begun in THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA and each is a polished gem from a gifted artist. Highly recommended for a very broad audience base.

Grady Harp

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780615188706

Author:

Meeks, Christopher

Publisher:

White Whisker Books

Subject:

Literary

Publication Date:

April 2008

Binding:

Paperback

Language:

English

Pages:

172

Dimensions:

9.00x6.00x.40 in. .57 lbs.