The Dead Fish Museum: Stories (Washington State Book Award)

Charles D'Ambrosio's collection will not disappoint. I have been a fan since reading his collection "The Point" in the 90s, one of my all-time favorites. His simple yet haunting writing seems effortless in its execution, showing a distinct mastery for his craft. Highly recommended.

In reading this collection, you get the impression that D'Ambrosio is a writer who understands pain--not just his own--that of those around him and that of our culture as a whole. The Dead Fish Museum is another name for a refrigerator that holds the bodies of fish pulled from a filthy river. Fish that will never be eaten, for they are too plentiful, too damaged. They are rotting. The characters in these eight stories are those fish, and so are we. Instead of being a culture which hangs onto rites of passage, rituals, ways in which we scar our body that show we have come through childhood--that we have made it into adulthood and are reborn--we are a culture which scars itself in private, which hides in closets and nicks its skin with razor blades, which takes burning matches to its flesh. In short, we are a culture who holds onto our pain so tightly--indeed, is shackled to it--that the only way to express it is through violence--directed at others, directed at ourselves. And why? Because we don't know what else to do. We have lost our survival skills and escape is no longer an option--fight or flight means nothing.

I don't write many reviews, but I had to for this one. D'Ambrosio is a favorite author of mine and his books are few and far between (I'll be looking through The New Yorker for my next fix). One of the stories didn't capture me, but I'm not going to ruin anyone's time by saying which one - we all have our opinions. If I had to pick a favorite though, that would be The High Divide: trenchant emotions, so beautifully expressed. And the ending sticks with you. I had previously read this short story and I happily read it again. It's a book you won't want to give away.

"Charles D'Ambrosio's second collection of fiction is superlative. The Dead Fish Museum demonstrates that Mr. D'Ambrosio can write about anything he chooses. Indeed, his stories are so various that he remains mysterious; his author-personality cannot be caricatured into a marketable outline that would haul him into the American spotlight, where he so richly deserves to be. Mr. D'Ambrosio can write in a humble voice. He can write quiet stories. He can write busy stories. He can write about aggressive, troubled youth. He can quickly sketch a Chinese bodega, kill of the owner, and leave him, a bare resonance at the beginning of a long story. And he can create characters who care almost as much about God as Flannery O'Connor's characters: "If your mind's too great for you," Pete was saying, "you should just let God take it. That's what Christ did. He was braindead. He never thought on his own." At the same time, Mr. D'Ambrosio can invent a Manhattan screenwriter who keeps "cranking out those bigtime Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the sillymeter." He is one of the few writers who can satirize hipster consumerism without sounding small: "In the little syncretic boutiquey spiritual figurines lined up on the windowsill and the crystal prisms strung from the ceiling on threads of monofilament I saw the very same occult trinkets that had decorated every bedroom I'd ever been in." He can also write like a wise old poet, with a character reflecting, "Our life together took on a second intention," after he learns that his wife was raped as a teenager. Or, like a young poet, he can write about a woman's eyes that "When you looked into them, you half expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones." The Dead Fish Museum collects stories of beauty, insight, and rare eclecticism."

The amazing thing about this octet is how fully developed the key characters and in some cases the support protagonists are; this level of depth usually requires a novel and that often fails to produce well rounded players like Charles D'Ambrosio has done with his short stories (and a few short novellas). The prime players share in common a fatal flaw that they fail to recognize as each one deceives themselves on what is causing their woes and how to fix their unhappiness. Instead they tend to misread the tea leaves and compound their inner turmoil and discord. All the inclusions are excellent and the collection will be recognized as one of the year's best anthologies with its insight into human needs and desires thwarted by personal negative traits in which rationalization, passing culpability and coping become the norm. The fascinating tales such as the twisted obsessive "Up North" with the husband fixated on bringing justice to the unknown family friend who raped his wife when she was a teen grip readers as few compilations can.