Mendocino and Other Stories

Having read and loved The Dive from Clausen's Pier, I couldn't wait to read another Ann Packer book. I am glad that I stumbled upon this great collection of short stories. Mendocino and Other Stories centers on the abrupt and unsettling changes in the lives of various thirty-something-year-old men and women. Packer writes about parenthood, loss and other storylines that are both funny and poignant at the same time. I admit that I had a difficult time getting into some of the stories and abandoned them altogether at the end because the author tended to drag out the plot, but there were others that I loved. My favorites are "Babies," "Horse," and "My Mother's Yellow Dress." This isn't the best short-story collection I have read and this work does not exceed Packer's The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Yet this book possesses some wonderful stories and great passages. I recommend Mendocino and Other Stories.

I simply adored each story. I spaced out each story reading to be sure to enjoy it as slowly as i could and make the pleasure last. Ann Packer is a philosopher. She writes like a poet scientist. She doesn't reduce complexity, by saying just what needs to be said, nothing more.I really recommend it. I usually prefer novels to short stories, because they sometimes leave me feeling hanging...but this is one of the best short stories collection i have ever read.

Ann Packer has assembled a natty group of ten stories that will thoroughly please the innocent voyeur within you. She takes you into the homes, minds, and hearts of her characters and introduces you to their environment, thoughts, and feelings. Her characters are real and likable.I have a certain affinity for the short story that lets me eavesdrop on the lives of others, and these fit the bill in every way. Most of them take place in the San Francisco area and if you have ever visited you may be reminiscent of your time spent there and even yearn to return again. Other than relationships, there is no true formula to these stories, and that's a good thing! "Ninety" is about the curmudgeonly Papa Louie's 90th birthday, his daughters and their families. "Lightning" describes a childless couple who take in a pregnant girl before they adopt her baby. "My Mother's Yellow Dress" describes a gay man's memories of his parents' marriage and his relationship with his mother. All unique, all excellent reads.

Ann Packer's stories are like gourmet mashed potatoes --- ordinary, everyday material, transformed to quintessence by a masterful hand. This volume is a reissue by Vintage of a previous (1994) collection, ten stories gathered from already-published sources and printed under the name of the title story, MENDOCINO. Readers who were first introduced to Ms. Packer by the success of last year's novel, THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, will be glad to have this opportunity to read more of her fiction.She writes with deceptive ease, most often lulling the reader into a sort of warmish, homey daze. That is, until she zaps you with the powerful insight that is the hallmark of all her work. Her perception of the human condition is an even greater gift than her pure writing ability --- and she has both qualities in abundance. Reading a Packer story is both as exhausting and rewarding as long-anticipated family visits.She writes of relationships --- not only the relationships of one person to another, but also of that deeper and more difficult to acknowledge relationship: the one we each have with ourselves. There is no better example of both than her lead story, "Mendocino."The second story of the ten, "Nerves," leans somewhat more in the direction of the second type of relationship and the unveiling of this truth is excruciatingly, exquisitely paced.My personal favorite of all the stories is "Lightening" because it is both somewhat more complex than the others and, for me anyway, the zappiest.I am not copping out as a reviewer here when I say that each and every one of the ten stories in this volume is so densely woven and of such intense construction that I would do both the author and the reader a disservice if I were to try to say what each story "is about." Nor am I being too tongue-in-cheek when I say that each story is approximately five thousand words. There are no plots to reveal as such, not like in a novel. Each story recounts incidents in the lives of the characters and places them in a chosen setting. Do we need to know that about half the stories take place in Northern California, while the rest are on the East Coast or in the Midwest? Not really, because it's the inner landscape that matters to Ann Packer.Read, enjoy and learn from her. I can't really tell you about it. You'll have to see for yourself, in the same way that you have to eat the master chef's mashed potatoes to experience the magnitude of that difference. --- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day

This is one of my favorite collection of short stories -- a real pleasure to read. There's a way that the stories move that makes me feel like humanity is acceptable. In a market economy where life is governed by the bottom line, that subtlety and nuance and ... breathing space is lost: no more humanity. We're little machines. And there are brilliant writers who distract us from the machines, like Nabokov, and there are writers, more rare, because their voice is more quiet and less eye-catching, less like brain candy (rigorous syntax, dazzling diction, complicated imagery, clever allusions to the most current lit crit/philophical thoughts, etc.), but they write stories that change your insides: ahh... this is how I can go on; this is how I can tune into the quieter things that make daily living bearable, even sweet. I would say that Ann Packer's writing paves the way for an internal space to breathe and find its way. I had a dream ages ago that moved this way - a 4 year old boy was trapped in his wizard grandfather's tremendous stone castle. He opened a trap door and slipped into a vast and empty stone hall and there was only a wooden platform wide enough for him to sit and stretch out, a door locked behind him, a swift drop of 40 feet to a stone floor. All the walls are flat stone. The ceiling is another 30 feet above him. He sits there quietly assessing the trap he's found himself in. His grandfather will not rescue him from this room. He pauses to digest what's happened to him; he's got all the time in the world. Then he feels the smallest, weakest impulse to shift his energy in a certain way. It hasn't opened the door that locked tightly behind him. It hasn't helped him fly so that he can find ways out, but he can feel that it brings him closer to a thought, a feeling, a sensation of finding his way out of the room. So he allows that sense to grow stronger in him. He keeps testing it and following it, not in a direct way, just... over time, gathering information internally to find his way out. The dream shifts; years later in his twenties he's a young magician. He survived. He found his way. That became the beginning of his wizard's training: honing in on the instincts to help him become himself, to find his way. This book of stories reminds me of the dream -- it works like an internal honing device to help this reader (me) find my way. The act of reading a book allows you to adopt someone else's thought patterns. Try these out.