Sweet Nothing (22 page)
Authors: Richard Lange
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #Short Stories, #Literary Fiction, #Single Authors
SWEET NOTHING
Stories
by
Â
by
Will you tell us a bit about
Sweet Nothing
?
It's my second collection of stories. (
Dead Boys
was the first.) They're mostly set in Southern California again, but I mixed things up this time when it came to narrators, time periods, writing style, etc. I wanted to stretch a bit. One thing that didn't change, though, is the cloud of desperation that hangs over the characters. I tend to write about the make-or-break moments in people's lives, and that continues in
Sweet Nothing.
What are a few of your personal favorites from the collection?
I love them all for different reasons. Writing each was an adventure for me, a journey, and I learned something from each one about myself as a writer and as a person and about the world around me. Writing is how I process life, the way I bring order to chaos.
What is your writing process for short fiction as opposed to full-length novels? Is it easier for you to write short stories, or more difficult (or neither)?
Writing anything is hard for me because I'm always pushing myself and I'm a harsh critic of my own work. That said, writing stories is hard in a different way from writing novels. With stories, the difficulty is stringing together a series of moments that sometimes don't want to be strung together into a cohesive emotional experience for the reader. With novels, I'm working a lot more with plot, with moving the story along. That's still a challenge for me. I tend to want to dawdle.
What do you like to see in a good short story?
I want an experience. I want to be entertained or moved or dazzled or taught something or impressed. I like it when writers aim high, when they go for it, whether that's through plot, character, structure, language, or rhythm.
What are a few of your favorite suspense short story collections (or single stories)?
Off the top of my head, Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Ernest Hemingway's “The Killers,” and anything from Denis Johnson's
Jesus' Son.
Have you read any good books lately? Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to this year?
Here is where I promote a few friends' books. I loved Jerry Stahl's
Happy Mutant Baby Pills
and T. C. Boyle's
The Harder They Come,
and Tom Cooper's
Marauders
was a great ride. I'm looking forward to reading Tod Goldberg's
Gangsterland,
William Boyle's
Death Don't Have No Mercy,
and Chris Offutt's new memoir.
What's next for you?
I'm working on a new novel and doing some screenplay work.
This interview was conducted by Kristin Centorcelli and originally appeared on her blog, My Bookish Ways (
mybookishways.com
). Reprinted with permission.
Putting together a playlist is a fun exercise. It gives me the chance to revisit some great songs and maybe turn people on to music they haven't heard before. None of the songs listed below directly inspired any of the stories they're paired with, but they do touch on the themes of the stories or re-create musically or lyrically the mood I was striving for as I wrote the pieces. Most of the songs are sad songs because most of the stories in
Sweet Nothing
are sad stories. That's just the way I'm built, I guess. Enjoy.
“The Dark Don't Hide It” by Magnolia Electric Co.
Jason Molina, the broken heart and tortured soul of Magnolia Electric Co., was a gifted musician who stepped offstage too soon when, after years of struggle, booze finally got the best of him in 2013. He left behind a bunch of gorgeous songs, including this one about those moments when the illusions we cloak ourselves in are suddenly torn away.
“Sin Ti” by Los Panchos
KXLU is the radio station at Loyola Marymount University. During the week it's your typical college radio outlet, with music you won't hear anywhere else played by endearingly amateurish DJs who tend to ramble a bit. On weekends the station switches to Latin music of all stripes. The show that's on every Sunday evening plays
románticos,
which are love songs played and sung by guitar trios. Most of them are from the fifties and sixties and seem as if they're being beamed in from a kinder, gentler world. They're the kinds of songs Blanca, the heroine of “Baby Killer,” would have heard on the radio when she was a child, the kinds of songs that might stick in a young girl's mind.
“River Guard” by Smog
Smog (Bill Callahan) is the only repeat artist here from a playlist I did for my first collection,
Dead Boys.
This song hints at some of the internal conflicts torturing the prison guard in this story. I've always thought the song had a Springsteen-y quality to it, like the best song that Bruce never wrote.
“Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues” by Danny O'Keefe
I had a shitty stepdad at the time this song was popular, and my mom used to refer to him derisively as “Good Time Charlie.” I owned the forty-five of this song back then and listened to it over and over, in retrospect perhaps trying to find a way into my stepdad's head. Unfortunately, he wasn't as self-aware as the guy in the song (or in the story, for that matter). He was just another dumb drunk, just another abusive asshole.
“Ambulance” by Manhattan Murder Mystery
Manhattan Murder Mystery is my favorite L.A. band right now. Their gutter poetry and rough-hewn sound warm the cockles of this old gritster's heart, and the self-loathing on display in this song meshes perfectly with the self-loathing that powers this story.
“The Rotting Strip” by Crooked Fingers
This song brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it, and I choked up recently while reading this story aloud during a bookstore appearance. So, a match made in heaven. Note: If you ever get a chance to see this band live,
do not miss it.
“This World (Is Going Up in Flames)” by Charles Bradley
I loved this the first time I heard it, and I love it still. This guy knows how to sell a song, and the apocalyptic tilt of the lyrics fits perfectly with that of the story.
“Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” by Merle Haggard
This story is set in post-some-sort-of-holocaust Bakersfield, and I'm certain that in post-some-sort-of-holocaust Bakersfield they'll still be listening to Merle.
“I'm a Stranger Here” by Lambchop
Nashville's finest does a killer version of this standard. It's got kind of a Hank Williams vibe to it, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a song about feeling lost in a world you once knew your way around in, and that's what the story's about too.
“Somewhere” by Tom Waits
This song brings together two of my favorite things: classic Broadway musicals and Tom Waits. My wife cried for two days after reading this story, and this version of the classic song from
West Side Story
never fails to put a lump in my throat, so it seemed like a good match.
This playlist originally appeared online at largeheartedboy.com. Reprinted with permission.
- Sweet Nothing
opens with Shakespeare (the epigraph) and closes with Shakespeare (Brewer's collection in “To Ashes”). What other Shakespearean themes and allusions did you notice throughout the collection? - In “Must Come Down,” we see the dark side of a father supporting his family. How is fatherhood portrayed in
Sweet Nothing
? Are children a burden, a saving grace, or something else altogether? Does fatherhood bring out the best or the worst in these men? - How are women depicted in this collection? Do the mostly male narrators influence how these women come across to the reader? How does the portrayal of women in “Baby Killer” contrast with the stories in
Sweet Nothing
? - “The Wolf of Bordeaux” and “After All” are the only stories in the collection that don't take place in present-day Southern California. How do these stories fit thematically within the rest of the collection? Do these two stories have anything else in common?
- In “The 100-to-1 Club,” the narrator says, “You have to lose eventually so that someone else can win. Bitch and moan all you want, but that's the first, and worst, rule of the universe” (page 101). Do you agree with him? Can there ever be a winner without a loser?
- In “Gather Darkness,” the narrator says, “I pass by the spot where that bum shit on the grass, and I think that if I see him again, I'll kill him. An instant later I'm likeâ¦where did that come from? It must have been a misfire or crossed wires. Or maybe it was somebody else speaking through me, maybe everybody else, the whole city” (page 119). How does Los Angeles shape the men and women in these stories? Do you think they are products of the city, or is the city a product of them?
- Multiple paragraphs in “Instinctive Drowning Response” begin with the phrase “Maryrose dies on Wednesday.” What effect does this repetition have? How does this device illuminate the experience of addiction? Of grief?
- Apocrypha are noncanonical religious texts accepted by some and dismissed by others, and the adjective “apocryphal” is generally used to describe a story that may or may not be true. How do the themes of belief, honesty, and truth play out in the story “Apocrypha”?
- “After All” ends with the phrase “a once-dark room livid with incandescent light” (page 183). Is this a hopeful image or a foreboding one? How does it tie in to the experiences of Bear and Benny elsewhere in the story? What other symbolism may be at work here?
- In “Sweet Nothing,” Dennis says, “We don't ask for help, people like us. We do our suffering in private, do our grieving in the dark” (page 204). How do other characters in
Sweet Nothing
deal with emotional pain? Which characters do you think deal with it best, or worst?
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Richard Lange
Reading group guide copyright © 2015 by Richard Lange and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Coyote illustration by Sam Chung
Author photograph by Paul Redmond
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.
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First ebook edition: February 2015
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Excerpt from “You Came Last Season” by Gregory Corso copyright © 1955 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted with permission by City Lights Books.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the publishers of earlier versions of these stories:
The Atlantic
Fiction for Kindle, “Must Come Down”;
Slake, The Best American Mystery Stories 2011,
“Baby Killer”;
The Summerset Review,
“The Wolf of Bordeaux”;
The Sun,
“The 100-to-1 Club”;
The Southern Review,
“Gather Darkness”;
New World Writing,
“Instinctive Drowning Response”;
Bull,
“Apocrypha”;
Kenyon Review Online,
“After All”;
Southern California Review,
“Sweet Nothing”;
Alaska Quarterly Review,
“To Ashes.”
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ISBN 978-0-316-32750-3
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