David Means

“The problem is, my son sees the man I am now and not the men I was before I became the man I am now. The man I am now is a result of his presence in my life and therefore I'm not even close to being the man I was before he existed...”

“You get intense heat at the bottom of a very large pile of bullshit, you see, and in the smithy of that heat a few of the words congeal and solidify and become diamonds of truth, bright enough to send shafts of light through the cracks.”

I love a good show more story collection, especially by an author I have never read and [Instructions for a Funeral: Stories], fits that bill. It is so smart, introspective and beautifully written. He takes hard and tender looks, at fatherhood, marriage, addiction and murder. I can not recommend it high enough. It might be my favorite collection of the year...so far, anyway. Oh, yeah- That last quote is dedicated to our Commander in Chief. show less

Maybe I’m just losing it, or I’m onto something. The reading mind can perceive things in many different ways, it just depends on how you are set up for what you’re reading. I had been reading the first three stories of this David Means collection, and I was kind of up and down about them. Then I had taken a break for a meal, and watched the last part of a favorite film, A River Runs Through It, the Robert Redford film based on the classic Norman Mclean book. I absolutely adore both the show more book and the movie, so I was in a great head space when I returned to Instructions for a Funeral again. I started reading the story “The Terminal Artist,” which blew my socks off. Just as I had cried with the intensity of the end of the movie, I found myself crying as I read that story.

I had read the praise and the reviews for this collection beforehand—which had initially forced my hand into ordering the collection— and suddenly it was obvious that all that praise was well deserved. David Means can write some wonderful stories that ring so true. Several of the reviews had dropped names like Proust, Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Chekhov, Poe, Denis Johnson, Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Ford, and in my new head space, I was in full agreement. Means seemed practically incapable of taking a false step in his stories. Every story is very original and most distinctively David Means.

For the rest of the book, I was impressed by story after story, as they all seemed so spot-on. Who the hell was I as a reader during those first three stories? This is his fifth story collection, and Means loves to slides some sly humor into some of his stories. They also change so much, story to story, always exploring something new with each one. You could find yourself on an FBI stakeout in one, and then in an evolving tale of a fistfight in Sacramento, or learning about a serial-killer, marriage, addiction, death, and wherever else he wants to take you. He always keeps you on your toes as he nimbly shows his creative mind in a pared down style that does so much with so little.

Let me pass on an apt quote from Jonathan Lethem, “David Means’s latest stories floored me. These are little machines for thinking and feeling, made sentences in which the object in the mirror—consciousness—is much closer than it ordinarily appears.”

I read another of his story collections, The Spot, many years ago, but my memory and review of it have been lost in time, but now his much-praised novel, Hystopia, is definitely on my radar screen. Instructions for a Funeral goes from the brutal to the tender both quickly and effortlessly. With these stories you might be reading about organized crime, real estate, or even a serial-killer nurse, but you will always be offered an opportunity to be involved with the people that truly live in these stories. David Means has a great touch when it comes to writing about the small moments of everyone’s life, and it’s those small bits of life that make all the difference … in life and in fiction. Lastly, I say, “Give me more David Means.” show less

Instructions for a Funeral is an extraordinary collection of fourteen short stories by David Means. In “Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950”, a simple fistfight turns out to be fraught with history and symbolism. In “The Terminal Artist” a grieving family learns their beloved mother may not die a natural death but perhaps was killed by an overly enthusiastic mercy killer. The description of her loss after surgery was so perfect, “What was hoped for and what happened were at odds.” show more A story that will break your heart is “Farewell, My Brother” that begins and ends with five men smoking outside a halfway house in Brooklyn.

The title story “Instructions for a Funeral” struck me as hilarious, an angry man planning a vengeful funeral with terrific music. I also loved the superstitious gamblers in “The Ice Committee.” The artistry of “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” was in all it did not say and in the clever twists of phrasing such as “A hunch twists inside the sinews and bones, integrating itself into the physicality of the moment, whereas a gut feeling can only struggle to become a hunch, and, once it does, is recognized in retrospect as a gut feeling.” The final story “Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother” broke my heart.

David Means manages to write sentences and paragraphs that run on for a page or more. In a way, he reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez in his ability to weave a sentence far longer than anyone should be able and not lose himself or the reader. I love the way he concretizes emotion into something corporeal. When we remember grief, we don’t remember the concept of grief, we remember the bodily pain and tension of grief. He understands that emotions are expressed in our bodies, not just on the surface..

“ It’s not just that no matter how often you sort and pick through the story, alongside your parents and your sister and everyone else, you can’t help but find yourself, against your better nature, feeling the big sway and spin of the cosmos—the dark eternal matter of the stars, which, however isotropic or evenly balanced, seem, when you think of him, to be moving in a circular pattern that reminds you that the nurse explained, each time, during each pre-visit orientation, that part of the healing process was to step off the merry-go-round and never step back on.”

I loved this book. I re-read every story.

I received a copy of Instructions for a Funeral from the publisher through NetGalley

Instructions for a Funeral at Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan
David Means interview on NPR

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/9780374279813/ show less

Short stories are always, in a sense, small canvases. Since short story writers have less space in which to express themselves, it follows that each of their words must carry more weight and do a better job of conveying meaning to their readers. David Means takes this idea to its logical extreme. Each of the stories in "Assorted Fire Events" is so carefully written that the language almost seems to get in the way of what's being described. Means, to his credit, pulls it off: these stories do show more an excellent job of portraying their subjects and describing their predicaments, and Means' authorial voice flows evenly and confidently, lingering over tiny details and fleeting emotions that less careful writers would disregard. They're also cleverly constructed, refusing to come to easy endings or conclusions, and Means keeps his writerly poise even as he relates hearbtbreakingly poignant events.

As impressive as Means's technique is, I can't help but think that some readers will find these stories too dry by half, and there is a claustrophobic, snow globe quality to some of his work. The author consistently chooses to use five-dollar words even when writing from the perspective of characters that probably wouldn't know them. That's an inconsistency that drives lots of readers crazy, but I'm thinking that realism isn't quite what the author is trying for. "Assorted Fire Events" reads like a master class in short story writing where every phrase is perfectly turned and every plot element carefully considered, and readers looking for superior literary craftsmanship will probably find this collection immensely satisfying. Incidentally, the back cover of my copy of "Assorted Fire Events" says that Means teaches writing at Vassar and has published stories in Harper's and the Paris Review. Imagine my surprise. show less