David Means begins this, his fifth collection of short stories, with the brief Confessions. In his previous collections, and his Booker-longlisted novel Hystopia, Means has established a voice – rigorous and dense and conversational by turns – that is among the most distinctive and affecting in contemporary American fiction; its trademark is the way it shifts easily between the fictional and the apparently autobiographical. This opening, however, seems like one directly from the heart. The confession is, to begin with, a small elegy for the stories that never got written, or those that were “trashed, put to bed, dead in the water, so to speak; lost to me, to eternity, or whatever”. Means likens, glancingly, those stories to human lives that pass unrecorded, and contrasts those unspoken existences with men and women whose lives find a finished narrative shape, and get told.
This sense – of tales being fashioned from the random flow of existence before the reader’s eyes – informs the 13 stories that follow. Means wrangles chaotic experience into sentences. As in his breakthrough collection, Assorted Fire Events, he is much concerned with violence, though as he states here in another “note to self”, from his opening Confessions, violence always begs for a context: “Though the human situation might be irredeemably bleak in the story, in life it is always surrounded by landscape, or people, who, seemingly against their will, provide symbolic grace, something beyond the horror of violence itself.”
As a case in point, Means then introduces his first story, Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950. We open, as we might open in any number of American stories, from Hemingway onwards, with an insider’s account of a bar-room brawl, after a word has fallen wrongly between two young men, one a gilded son of the local landowner, the other an “Okie”, or farmhand. Queensbury boxing rules meet streetfighter’s cunning, and there is, though the fight hangs in the balance for several introspective pages, only one victor in this contest. It is what follows that gives Means his edge as a storyteller, though. The fight becomes the occasion and the touchstone for a whole unfolding life, a love story and a meditation on fate – the “symbolic grace” that he is often trying to locate.
He learned that balancing act, he suggests in that introduction, from his father who “even when facing violence himself, in one form or another, trusted in reality”. There is much about fathers and sons in the stories that follow.
The heart-stopping account that any father of young children will recognise, of watching a young son run just out of reach towards the jeopardy of a tidal river, is the whole action of The Chair, an internal monologue that captures exactly the primal fear of loss and its opposite: “Love is the moment just as he comes out of the schoolhouse door, standing amid his friends, and searches for my eyes.” The ways that fathers and sons challenge that bond – betrayal, temptation, foolishness – is the substance of several other of the stories.
Means has a practised gift for putting you in the head of his narrators. The title story, Instructions for a Funeral, is a wonderful set-piece dramatic monologue that updates, for example, the last requests of Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb. Here, the living will comes from a man of business, a property developer, William Kenner, who uses his instructions to his lawyer to settle some old scores and make good some grievances: “Note: I would like my body to be on display, dressed in a clean white shirt, black tie, dark trousers, along with my hand-sewn Italian shoes. (Please have them resoled.) … If my face is disfigured by an act of violence – most likely at the hands of Sullivan, but possibly Bob Hartwell, who had a grudge against me because of the tree-chopping incident … do your best to clean up the blemishes.”
The crafted ironies of these stories often put you in mind of the modern American greats of the form, including Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.
Means includes a direct homage to Carver, imagining the writer, whom he met only once, as a young man, on his premature deathbed: “Once I drew stories out of the chaos and void the same way I reached under the mattress that time, in what I called a drying-out joint, to find my clandestine cigarettes, the pack crumpled and soft, and against the rules smoked at the window.” It’s a risk doing this, putting your words in the mouth of the master, but as elsewhere here, Means’s sentences, and his supple intelligence, prove a match for the task at hand.
• Instructions for a Funeral by David Means is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
