The LitBlog Coop announces its spring 2007 Read This! pick today: Alan DeNiro’s debut short story collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. I was the nominator, so I’m thrilled that my colleagues at the LBC found it to be a worthy read. Pleasantly surprised, even.
See, I’m in an MFA program, studying fiction. In one of my classes, each student was instructed to bring in a story that impressed them, and to write up a short paper/presentation on its outstanding qualities. There were two Hemingways, a Tobias Wolff, a John Cheever, a Ring Lardner, a Mary Gaitskill. Many of them were stories that the grad students had been taught in previous classes. I wanted to bring in something new, so I chose the title story from this collection.
They hated it.
I thought that, being in Pittsburgh, my classmates would be charmed by the story’s setting — a futuristic Pittsburgh dystopia. I had thought that they would, like me, find the story funny and smart. That they’d appreciate the craft of it, especially how the story’s end illuminates the beginning; it’s surprising, yet it’s all there, right from the get-go. I had thought they’d notice the language, the love story, the creepy almost-real details like the augmented chickens. But I was wrong.
And I had already nominated the book as a spring pick for the LBC.
When the voting came around, I awaited the inevitable smackdown, the e-mailed cries of “why did you make us read this,” the terrible, horrible anger of these hardworking, hard-reading litbloggers. But the harangues never came. To my surprise, they actually liked it. I felt like one of Mikey’s brothers in that Life commerical.
The LBC will be discussing this book in a few weeks, talking about what they liked (or didn’t) about it. I tentatively suggest that you read it and join in with your own thoughts. You might like it, too.
“They hated it.”
Did they say why?
Wow, that’s depressing. I love the idea of presenting a story, though. If it makes you feel any better, my first thought was Daniel Orozco’s “Orientation” and I doubt that would have gone over very well either.
Looking forward to checking this one out!
So why did these presumably youthful (mostly youthful, for sure!) people dislike the story so very much? Curiosity must be satisfied.
In my experience, SBP doesn’t publish bad books. I haven’t read this one yet, but the ire of your peers makes me even more curious.
How is the book as a whole? Recently I have trying to find a way to read short story collections that keeps the stories from running together if the collection itself isn’t set up to do that.
The class began with the professor saying, essentially, “Why don’t we like stories like this?” Whie in some graduate courses that might prove to be a rhetorical trick, in this one it was not: students were expected to talk about not liking the story.
The conversation was then turned to “experimental” fiction — a term which has been used, in my creative writing courses, almost entirely derogatorily. The footnotes in the story “Skinny Dipping” were described as too edgy, too difficult (altho one student tried to defend them) — and any efforts to cite the decades-long use of footnotes in creative writing were swept aside.
I should have done a better job standing up for the story, but I was unprepared for the reaction. It proved to be a turning point for me in a class for which I’d had high hopes.
This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”