The End Of The Straight And Narrow

Have you ever finished reading a story and then realized that as soon as possible you must tell it to someone else? I had that experience over and over again as I read the stories in David McGlynn's The End of the Straight and Narrow. The stories are exquisitely crafted on almost every level, but to discuss them in terms of point of view, plot, character development, or controlled use of language is to miss what sets them apart from other well-crafted stories. McGlynn's stories insist on being retold because they are not merely exquisitely crafted but also illuminating, and because the things they illuminate matter deeply. Faulkner articulated the underlying principle this way: "The human heart in conflict with itself ... alone can make good writing." Flannery O'Connor said: "The greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul." The narrator of one of McGlynn's stories calls our attention to the importance of "the time you zagged instead of zigged." The stories are easy enough to summarize: A divorced father discovers something within himself that affects his relationships with his son and his estranged daughters and his new wife. A pastor tells lies and half-truths to win converts to Christ while a friend's life unravels. A father facing the imminent death from cancer of his nine-year-old son gratefully takes it upon himself to grant his son's final wish. A disappointed would-be Olympic swimmer spends years recovering from a momentary act that shatters his self-image. A mother's sudden blindness and subsequent withdrawal from family life cause her husband, son, and daughter to lose their bearings and the family to disintegrate. But an impulse to summarize isn't what arises. Upon finishing each story, the impulse that arises is to tell it to someone dear to you in all of its gloriously rich, interconnected detail. If you're like me, you'll follow that impulse again and again. With any luck, it will help you hold on to the stories and continue to reflect upon them, learn from them, marvel at them.

This absorbing collection of nine short stories has two common themes: Texas as a homeland and Christianity as a balm and a barb. Some of the characters in the first four stories grew up with Jesus and never leave Him, however they may struggle at times with the organized church. The narrator son in the Houston family of the second part's five stories (which comprise a novella) encounters Jesus late, after his blind and depressed mother has driven his scientist father into the bed of her longtime caretaker. In his remorse, as his marriage is collapsing, the father seeks counseling and becomes Born Again. Thus he becomes what many devout believers are in America today, and particularly the evangelical Christians of the stories in the book's first part: outsiders in a secular society which either mocks the expression of their values, attacks them as subversive, or ignores them altogether. Mr. McGlynn comes at it all as a skilled reporter, neither endorsing nor condemning, but finely detailing the challenges and the rewards of a way of life that increasingly is being lost to us.

I read this in two days, because once I started, I had to ignore other things I had going on so I could finish. Just because I blew through the book, though, doesn't mean that the collection is light reading; I cried most of the way through it. McGlynn has created characters that I not only know, but both sorrow and cheer for. An amazing read. Buy this book. Seriously.

These are wonderful stories - they contain what a lot of American fiction doesn't these days: a moral spine. McGlynn's characters are good people trying to make their way through life without doing harm. They are flawed beings, just like the rest of us - and he draws them with such compassion, without judgment. His observations are very fine - he's looking where you wouldn't necessarily look - which gives the stories a freshness that is very fine too. And they have a depth, an expansiveness and generosity that makes them satisfying and memorable the way novels are. These stories feel essential.

Many of our better collections of short stories have more in common with poetry than they do with the novel. They do a dazzling dance with language, and leave the reader pierced with a single knife. For all the pleasure those kinds of story collections offer, they sometimes leave the reader unsatisfied on grounds of plot or characterization or long-term resonance. Few writers dare step into this breach and offer up stories that aspire to contain within them the whole broad world and leave in their wake (and their white space) the novel they've managed to breathe in the space of a story. Toward these ends, the writer must walk a fine line: On the one hand, the writer must waste no words, and on the other, the writer must bravely avoid making anything minimal. The list of those who have accomplished this feat is small and formidable: Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever make the short list. To their ranks (I'm very, very pleased to have discovered), the lucky reader might add the name of David McGlynn, and his beautiful, moving, possibly earth-shattering book The End of the Straight and Narrow, a book that dares take on a much-maligned segment of middle America, render it full and true, and in the process show us something not only about the smallish world his characters inhabit, but also, by a skill I can hardly believe possible in a writer so young, show us a thing (or twenty) about what it means to be a human being living among other human beings. SMU Press has done readers a favor, and I hope the marketplace will do its part to spread the word, because The End of the Straight and Narrow is a book that deserves a large and attentive audience, and rewards multiple readings. It sits proudly on my shelf alongside the books I plan to keep and revisit again and again.