The End of the Straight and Narrow by David McGlynn (review)

144 book notes The End of the Straight and Narrow, by David McGlynn Southern Methodist University Press, 2008 reviewed by Wendy Rawlings There’s a lot of bad weather in David McGlynn’s stories. In his debut collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, fires engulf suburban California homes, landslides wipe out sections of the Pacific Coast Highway, and Texas hurricanes inundate whole towns with flood water. Against this backdrop of natural disasters, McGlynn’s characters confront a plethora of human catastrophes: blindness, heart disease, osteosarcoma. Readers find themselves tightrope-strung between bad weather and bad genes, alert to learn which characters will suffer most from what form of disaster. In the midst of this bad luck of biblical proportions , McGlynn’s characters struggle to come to terms with the ways in which disasters challenge or alter their beliefs. These are big, earnest, realist stories. I haven’t read much in the way of big, earnest, realist stories of late. As someone who teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops and reads hundreds of stories each year, I’d have thought I’d encounter a whole lot of big, earnest, realist stories. But that isn’t the case. Unlike so many slight or bafflingly elliptical stories that cross my desk, McGlynn’s are freighted with high drama and symbolic import. The titles alone convey the seriousness of his themes: “Deep in the Heart,” “Testimony,” “Consequences of Knowledge.” I heard myself groan a little as I surveyed the table of contents. Would these stories collapse under the weight of such portent? Mostly they don’t. Mostly McGlynn won me over. These are serious, traditional stories that wrestle honestly with the Big Questions and don’t end with the tidy morality-flavored nugget favored by O. Henry and Hollywood. Of course, from literary fiction I wouldn’t expect easy endings, but when a book begins with a character sharing a pamphlet called Four Steps to Salvation with a pair of skycaps, I’m on the lookout for excesses of the true believer’s moral certitude or the atheist’s cheeky irony. As an agnostic myself, I’m prone to laugh at people who approach CRSUM09 nonfiction.indd 144 5/22/2009 12:43:41 PM 145 Book Notes me with pamphlets and proselytizing, but McGlynn treats all his characters’ spiritual and moral dilemmas with equanimity. As I read this collection, I kept thinking of Chekhov’s claim that “it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism.” As it happens, McGlynn thinks a whole lot about God and pessimism —and also about betrayal, jealousy, kindness, blindness, unrequited love, mortality, and the human condition. The situations in which McGlynn places his characters often seem to literalize that old cliché about being caught between a rock and a hard place. In “Seventeen One-Hundredths of a Second,” a young man named Jonah sleeps with his dead best friend Charlie’s pregnant widow and ends up telling her, while they’re in bed together, that Charlie used to sleep with strange women when he went out of town. “‘I thought you knew what he was like,’ he said. ‘I thought you liked it.’” McGlynn paints a nuanced portrait of a naïve young man struggling to reconcile his contradictory feelings about his best friend, who died of heart failure while swimming competitively with Jonah, and about Abby, the widow, with whom sex further complicates an already complicated relationship. In “The End of the Straight and Narrow,” a young man drives his blind, depressed mother out into flood-ravaged Galveston and obeys her request to stop for a drink in a bar, where she flirts with a man who wants to take her away for the day. “I could tell she wanted to go with him, but I couldn’t let her. How could I let her?” the narrator asks. McGlynn shines at creating moments of truly heart-rending ambiguity, when all choices available to his characters seem fraught with unbearable risk and moral compromise. Let your blind, depressed mother go off...