Selected Stories

The first paragraph of this review was written for the series of stories in Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al that are also contained in the present book under review as well. In addition to You Know Me, Al there some other classic baseball stories here, particularly Alibi Ike and My Roomy that can be covered by the comments in the first paragraph below. The other, non-baseball, stories in this book are reviewed in the second paragraph. At one time early in the first part of the 20th century there was no question that baseball was the American pastime. That was a time when the name Ring Lardner was well known in sports writing and literary circles. The sports writing part was easy because that was his beat. The literary part is much harder to recognize but clearly the character of Jack Keefe has become an American classic. Does one need to be a baseball fan to appreciate this work? Hell, no. We all know, in sports or otherwise, this guy Keefe. Right? You know the guy with some talent who has no problem blaming the other guy for mistakes while he (or she) is pure as the driven snow. That is the concept that drives these stories told as in the form of letters to Al, his buddy back home. The language, the malapropisms and the schemes all evoke an earlier more innocent time in sport and society. I do not believe that you could create such a character based on today's sport's ethic. The athletes would have a spokesperson `spinning' their take on the matters of the day. The only one that might have come close is Nuke LaRouche in the movie Bull Durham but as that movie progressed Nuke was getting `wise'. Read these stories. More than once. There is no question that aside from a deft ear as a sportswriter Ring Lardner also had an ear for the foibles and frustrations of the newly rising middle class of the post World War I Midwestern heartland. This is not the land of Fitzgerald's or Hemingway's "Lost Generation" but of those left behind trying to scratch out an existence anyway they could. However, rather than beat up on the `yokels' straight up Lardner pokes and prods at their pretensions in a fairly harmless way, at least on the surface, but on re-reading these stories recently I found myself saying `ouch' to the literary stabs in the backs that he thrust at his victims in stories like Gullible's Travels (a title which aptly sums up my comment) and The Big Town. Read on.

What a great gift it is to be funny on the page, to be able to make people laugh outloud. Ring Lardner had this in a big way. Mark Twain did it first and had his characters talk very much like the people he had met. But Ring Lardner does this for all kinds of American midwest and smalltown American people. He does it for boxers and baseball players, for gangsters and actresses. This collection includes much of the best Lardner and is highly recommended.

I absolutely love Ring Lardner. Some of his classics such as "Alibi Ike" and "Champion" are included in this volume. Champion is a frightening portrait of a brutal, totally amoral heavyweight champ who makes Mike Tyson look like a choir boy. The character is absolutely chilling and stands in sharp contrast to the many humorous characters Lardner has created. The beauty of his more humorous creations is that they bring a chuckle but are not so outlandish as be unreal. What is funny is that we all probably know people who are just like those satirized by Lardner. My criticism of this collection is that it omits my favorite Lardner story: "Mr. & Mrs. Fixit." We all know people like those lampooned in that story and it's too bad it's missing. My suggestion is to buy a collection that omits the short novel "You Know Mw Al" and buy one with a larger selection of shorter stories and then buy "You Know Me Al" separately. However, if you do buy this, you will still most certainly get your money's worth.