The Secret Goldfish

It's a pretty big act of hubris to name your book after something from Catcher in the Rye (Holden's brother wrote a book by the same name), and at first I avoided the book because of the title. But don't judge this one by the cover, or the title. When a rave review of The Secret Goldfish appeared last fall by Richard Eder--the only New York Times reviewer I trust--I went out and bought the hardcover. Eder was right. Means stands out as one of the best writers of his generation. Hard and dark and intense, and brilliantly different, each story, they hold together somehow. Means doesn't shy away from the dire lives of his characters. He writes equally well about the underclass kid life in Michigan, and the upper class yuppie life out East. He sees the hard lines. This, and his last book, are two of the best story collections I've read. It's like discovering something, to find his work. Many take place here in Michigan, but they range the country. some of folktales. Some of realistic. The Secret is out. (Means was mentioned in the recent Harper's essay and in a long review by James Wood in The London Review.) As a grad student at Michigan I used to hunker down and feel that great sense of wonder at a great book. Reading Means, I felt it again.

"The Secret Goldfish" is certainly a great collection of short stories. The themes in the stories seem to be universal in the way they focus in on human emotion (sometimes heartbreakingly so). Means seems to always have a bead on the pulse of his readers. He exhibits a unique ability to know when to go for the jugular and when to pull back. I would highly recommend this collection.

This inventive collection of stories revolves around the off-kilter - either something happens that cannot be explained or the characters are bewildered about how they came to be where they are. In the title story, a goldfish survives for nine years despite the odds in a murky, nearly airless tank while a marriage disintegrates. "Blown From the Bridge" tells of the last moments a young man shares with his lover before she and her car are blown off the Mackinac bridge, her fate sealed by a mysterious dedication to her father. The main character of "Lightning Man" cannot escape a lifetime of lightning strikes, but he continues anyway through his ruined and neurologically-fried life. "It Counts as Seeing" recounts the same incident of a blind man falling down the steps of a bank from multiple points-of-view so that this straightforward incident ends up being anything but. The lyricism in Means's style elevates these seemingly simple stories to a more complex level, as the oddity of life is grounded in the beautiful language of the specific. In most of these stories, Means plays with form. The above mentioned story about the blind man challenges the use of first-person as reliable narrator. "Michigan Death Trip" eschews traditional narrative development by linking its vignettes not through character or plot, but through the end results. In some cases, the author fails, as in "The Nest" when a poignant story is interrupted by a break in form, but mostly he succeeds brilliantly. These vibrant stories have the unexpected emotional impact of life itself. I highly recommend this collection to avid readers of short fiction.