The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy by David Ebenbach (review)

Is it considered a spoiler to talk about the last piece in a short story collection? If you feel that it is, go ahead and skip the next paragraph. You can come back to it later, once you've read David Ebenbach's The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy all the way through.

In "We'll Finish When We're Done," the final story in the collection, a barber gives a man a trim, not stopping until all that's left is the man's glowing, green soul. That's a pretty good analogy for Ebenbach's approach to writing—cutting away everything extraneous to reveal the most honest and vulnerable part of each character. Most of the stories collected here have downright silly premises, but the abundance of whimsy doesn't stop this book from being serious.

Ebenbach takes a playful approach to form, and much of his writing is highly stylized and meta. Some pieces take the form of lists, like the titular story, which mostly names the people who were invited to the orgy: "Solaire because she's crazy and John and Walt because they're both so good-looking and they're dating anyway, and we invited Amy because everybody just loves Amy…" It continues in this way for pages before briefly stating who wasn't invited and why. Even Ebenbach's more traditional stories, with fully fleshed-out scenes, tend to read like one big buildup to a punchline of an epiphany. Such a style could easily come across as gimmicky and repetitive, but somehow it doesn't. Somehow the glowing green soul at the end always manages to transcend the shtick surrounding it. (If you skipped that second paragraph, then I guess you don't know what the glowing green soul part is about, but you can probably get enough through context.)

There are a few cases where the endings feel a little more forced and unsatisfying. "Two Late at the Liberty Bell Restaurant," for example, concludes with the lines "…I finally realized what my question was. I didn't turn around to go back and ask it, though. I don't think the question would have come with me if I had." (I didn't think a spoiler alert was necessary there, because what do those lines even mean?) But for the most part, each punchline/epiphany is a tiny miracle.

Speaking of punchlines, one of the strongest stories in the book, "Out of Grapes," is all about joke-telling. In it, a few couples sit around after a dinner party and tell jokes—some corny, and some filthy. It's reminiscent of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in the way it develops its characters through the nuances of their conversation. The women at the party tell jokes mainly to share in an experience with the group, while the men become increasingly competitive. As the narrator observes, "…if things turn to joke-telling in a room of mixed company, it starts to go bad. At some point it's just cave times all over again, all the guys trying to be alpha." Unlike the typical Carver story, "Out of Grapes" ends sweetly—even the most obnoxious of the joke tellers comes across as human and ultimately forgivable.

Amid the jokey sweetness, though, is one story that sticks out sharply. "The Quiet House" takes us through the mundane activities of a pedophile who is keeping two young girls captive in his house. The first-person narration puts us right in the man's head, a deeply unpleasant place to be. Thankfully the rapes aren't described in any detail. And the reader is never tempted to pull for the narrator, which is always a risk with villain protagonists. But as I read "The Quiet House," I still found myself wondering if this was a story that really needed to exist. Why write this story? To show that a...