A snapshot of life Stateside

11 April 2012

First sentences are come-ons. Good ones attract your attention and leave you wanting more: "Early in my career as a crime-scene cleaner, I was sent to the house of a woman living in Crown Point, Indiana, about two hours from where I lived"; "I lost everything"; "For the last 15 years I've been confined to a nine-by-seven cage of solid steel bars, squeezed between walls I can touch with my fingertips if I stretch my arms"; "I come from a family of morticians." Each of these opening shots can be found in Paul Auster's collection of down-home stories written by the great American public.

However, Edwina Portelle Romero from Las Vegas, New Mexico (sic), blows them all away: "It was the year my mother stopped drinking, so it was two years after a careless driver killed my sister on a crosswalk, one year after my father died of a massive coronary on the front stairs, eight months before my brother Ronnie died of Aids, and six months before he revealed his situation." She is not making this up because, as it says in the title, these tales are true. The fact that what follows is by no means negative or depressing is even more amazing.

The work of 180 amateur authors is on display in this handsome book which Paul Auster, its editor, describes in his introduction as "a museum of American reality". Some of it, for example Janet Zupan's memory of her horse-chasing father, who died in a Vietnamese prison camp in 1967, is highly professional. All of the writers have a distinctive voice which allows them to buttonhole the reader - a vital requirement because they were actually bidding to have their tales broadcast on the radio.

Auster invited listeners to a programme called Weekend All Things Considered to contribute "anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives". He has artfully arranged the best of them into 10 sections, including Families and Strangers, Animals and Objects, and Love and Death.

Outrageous coincidences, quirks of fate and meetings cute abound. The result is a sort of up-market version of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not! annual. A San Franciscan trolley-bus driver, the manager of the camera department at Macy's, a toilet-trained bobcat and Mickey Mouse are all here. So are the ghosts of the American Civil War, the Depression and the Second World War. Racists and pornographers rub shoulders with drunks and decent right-thinking folk. Childhood memories linger on: Rick Beyer from Lexington, Massachusetts, explains how he was duped into eating peas; Tim Clancy from Marquette, Michigan, can still see his infant self, standing outside in his pyjamas on a summer's night: "I smell lilac blossoms, the freshly cut grass, cow manure, Ivory soap." The rehearsed spontaneity of the creative writing class is remarkably rare.

The stories that pluck the heartstrings make more of an impression than those that tingle the spine. Their last lines cap their first: "Never before had she seen a man wrestled to the ground by his own coat"; "and that was the morning Danny Kowalski beat me up". A Lesson Not Learned, by Carol Sherman-Jones of Covington, Kentucky, is the tale which begins "I lost everything." It pinpoints the moment in her childhood when her life changed. Her laughing father suddenly slaps her face: "I learned not to trust his laughter. Because even his laughter hurt."

Time and again these wonderful stories show that a split second can last for ever.

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A snapshot of life Stateside

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