Plan B for the Middle Class: Stories - Softcover

Carlson, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393331822 ISBN 13: 9780393331820

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992

Synopsis

In The News of the World, Ron Carlson's celebrated last collection, it was widely noted that the news was good. Here, as everybody goes to Plan B, the news is stronger, edgy, and bittersweet.

Here are men and women in the middle--of life, of relationships. There is a difference between what they set out for and what they get. A single mother keeps house on an aircraft carrier. A new father finds himself seduced by a motorcycle. A lonely professor is forced to face a few truths. Braced by honesty and lifted by affection for the world, these stories are a stunning showcase for a writer tackling universal themes in new ways. Get ready: when Plan A breaks down, Ron Carlson is here.

About this title

About the Author:

Ron Carlson teaches creative writing at Arizona State and lives in Scottsdale. His stories, much anthologized, have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Playboy, and other magazines.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Carlson (The News of the World, 1987; Truants, 1981; Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1977) writes stories in High Workshop Style: odd frameworks, scant forward motion, pearled with mundane perceptions of gladness and gloom that all come across as post- adolescent: ``I love to fly,'' the narrator of the title story confides--``I always sit in the window and press the corner of my forehead against the plastic glass. I can feel the little bumps in my skull which are full of ideas and I move my head slightly. It kind of hurts in a nice way. Today my skull is full of sex. I'm trying to remember sex.'' This story has its moments--a young couple, parents of small children: their exhaustion, their deferred life--but is dragged on long past the point at which its middleweight anecdotes support it as a tale. Similarly in ``The Golf Center at Ten Acres,'' a story about an ex-touring-pro who rescues his failing life by turning disaster into novelty, Carlson reaches for a rueful philosophy that is snagged by the story's overlength. The fey humorous pieces included here--like a single mom, in ``On The U.S.S. Fortitude,'' living with her family alone on an aircraft carrier--are mostly outlined whimsies; and only in ``Blazo''--a man going to Alaska to see where his grown son died- -does Carlson seem enough interested in his characters, as opposed to his own shiny voicings, to make for involving fiction. Bland stuff. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0393331822
• ISBN 13: 9780393331820
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224