press

5/26/05

Regular Joe Six-Pack: Short Stories Filled with Colorful Characters
By Ranald Totten
As published in the Encore Online Guide to Entertainment in Wilmington, North Carolina

So there's this guy and he's a forklift operator at a large county landfill. He knows the junk that goes into landfills—old computers; car fenders; box springs; and plastic, plastic, plastic—like a postal worker knows zip codes. But there's one item that shows up regularly and it just might come in handy: expired beer. Just like the college freshman who makes it a badge of honor to swill the cheapest beer on the market, this guy has discovered the best bargain in town.

This is the type of character that shows up repeatedly in author Gary Fincke's quirky, exhilarating and mostly disconcerting collection of short stories, Sorry I Worried You. The winner of last year's Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, Fincke's book will never scale the summit of Amazon's literary mountain, but it's superior to just about anything that has.

Fincke, a professor of English and the Director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, is no stranger to the short story—or the poem for that matter. He's a celebrated and award-winning writer whose work has yet to penetrate the masses. Maybe it's his characters, which in Sorry I Worried You include a newsstand clerk at a strip mall, a guy who encounters several lightning strike and electrocution victims, and a llama rancher who is unusually harsh to both his livestock and his wife.

In the macabre "Wire's Wire, Until It's a Body," a disgraced professor, recently denied tenure, assists his neurotic wife with her illness (she thinks she sees dead bodies along the road). Along the way the teacher experiences an emotional breakthrough of his own. The couple's testy dialogue will be familiar to Venus/Mars lovers the world over:

"Like this tenure bullshit. They think they're doing you a big favor giving you a year's grace, but it's dreadful. Going to work everyday knowing you're fired. It's like being in the stocks."
"The students don't know."
"The hell they don't."
"You're wrong."
"As long as I think I'm right, it doesn't matter if I'm wrong."

Fincke explores several themes throughout his stories. Sickness is a big one, and hospitals, but also everyday folks and odd blue collar jobs. In "The Serial Plagiarist" a high school English teacher with a bad knee might or might not be having an affair with a student. As in many of Fincke's stories, his characters exhibit a great distrust for the health industry:

"On the last day, after 21 sessions, Rhoads walked tentatively back into the waiting room where he'd been leaving his crutches during the past five appointments. The therapist wanted to give him a t-shirt that advertised his services. 'Wear this when you start running again'."

Fincke's characters deal with other, more serious hardships. There's a cancer patient in one story and an insane person in another, but the affliction that stands out the most appears in "The History of Staying Awake." Here the author uses the arresting image of dead puppies to describe a curious man's obsession with scientific research into sleep deprivation.

"A hundred years ago," the story begins, "a scientist kept puppies awake to study the effects of sleeplessness. He had them poked and prodded to stay alive, and it took those puppies anywhere from four to six days to die."

Fortunately, Fincke doesn't usually rely on such charming anecdotes to keep our attention. Indeed, his stories are generally subtle and always populated by those ordinary people, like janitors or unskilled workers. "Piecework," for example, is a class struggle story evocative of just about any period in history. Not surprisingly, Fincke is backing the underdog. The title refers to women laborers at a Heinz factory who get paid by the amount of chicken meat they can pull off the bones. As two young couples make out in a car, one of the girls suddenly blurts out, "My father says piecework at a place like Heinz is exploitation."

Sorry I Worried You is peppered with compelling aphorisms, the type of clever maxims that make you stop and reread: "Absolutes are like passenger pigeons." Another one reads: "There were millions of them, and then they all disappeared before we were born," while yet another character says definitively, "I know just enough about everything to try the wrong things." Or there's the insightful college professor, who says, "Nobody teaches anymore. They encourage."

The book occasionally suffers from obscure references that fall flat. How many readers, for example, recall the Walter Brennan character in the old TV show "The Real McCoys"? I'm not certain that demographic is picking up Fincke's book.

Still, younger readers will love Sorry I Worried You for its confident reliance on simple humanity sculpted in undiluted, indelible contours. While his characters are ordinary (and often unlikable) rubes like you and me, the basis for his story ideas are never less than titillating. Gary Fincke manages to keep readers both absorbed and delightfully off balance.

The next time I'm out of beer, I just might have to check our local landfill.