The Almond-Wilson Letters

By STEVE ALMOND AND JONATHAN WILSON

Attention, JBooks readers: two funny, smart, and ribald collections of short stories are either on the shelves or on the way. Steve Almond’s The Evil B. B. Chow will be published in April and Jonathan Wilson’s An Ambulance Is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble is awaiting you at a local superstore. Both writers live and teach in Boston but neither knew the other… until we introduced them and they began corresponding. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s eavesdrop on what these distinguished Jewish men of letters have to say to one another.

Dear Jonathan,

Well look, it’s hard for me to resist a story, such as your “Dead Ringers,” that begins: “Henry, lying on a table in the ultrasound room, felt the young nurse spread warm jelly over his testicles.” I’m big on jelly (the warmer the better) and my feeling about testicles is pretty well documented by now. But what I really admire is the cosmic joke.

What is it about authors these days? They treat their characters so gently, so boringly. There’s very little sense of play in the work, and not nearly enough humiliation. You’ve managed to bugger the template, thank God. Half your people wind up in hospitals or graveyards, and the rest get busted or sloshed or both.

And funny!

Why don’t people write funny anymore? What is with this accursed culture of restraint? Where every story becomes this grueling slog, this sl-o-o-o-o-w accretion of meaning, obedient sentence after sentence, until the culminating little burp of emotion at the end. Or this emotionally evasive cleverness, what I guess the critics call post-modern writing. Oy vey.

So thank you for offering up your beautiful losers and not trying to pretty them up.

But I guess I should clarify: I don’t mean that you humiliate your characters for sport, or for laughs. There’s something quite gentle in your regard for them. It’s just that their lives, the circumstances they find themselves in, are humiliating. And that’s really most of life, isn’t it? The true story of our lives is our humiliations, as your countryman Orwell says.

Which brings me to this: how long did you live in England? Do you have the accent? Because so many of your stories feature British characters (my personal fave was Tosh, the ex-pat drug dealer who gets hornswoggled by a shifty Jewess). And, for that matter, what’s it like being a Jew in England? I think of the place as so extraordinarily WASPy.

And also: Is your mother still alive? Because a couple of the stories feature mothers who are so monstrously self-involved and sad, and I couldn’t help thinking (guilt-stricken Jewish boy that I am): what if Jonathan’s mother reads these stories? Talk about a guilt-trip for the ages.

Anyhow, lots more to say, but I’ll await your response.

Dutifully,


Steve

_____

Dear Steve,

First, congratulations on your impeccable timing. There couldn’t be a better moment to meditate on “The Idea Of Michael Jackson’s Dick.” (A wonderful story, by the way). You’ve got to get a tie-in to E! What I love about your stories is the way you swagger like a hard ass but always end up revealing yourself as a softy. The end of “The Evil B.B.Chow,” for example, has a lyric intensity that blew me away. I think we both try to carry dark subject matter in a light basket. I don’t know about you but my mentor in this regard is Grace Paley. I’ve always admired her economy and the brief heavy story that reads like a comedy. She does “write funny.” The reason (other) people don’t anymore is because the culture seems too dumb to figure out that “funny” doesn’t necessarily equal “superficial.”

It’s a little strange to read your book because of the overlaps of place, subject matter (unwanted manuscripts dumped on writers), and sometimes even a character’s name—“Henry.” But here’s what I like: a story’s going along and up pops “the golden varnish of summer” or “the harvest, which hangs so heavily yellow above the sea it might be God, or my heart.” These are breathtaking moments—you do everything you can to be a wild man Steve, but actually you have the heart of a poet.

OK. Yes, I have a British accent—but only to Americans. When I’m in London people ask me what part of the States I’m from. I came here in 1976, when I was 26. Re: my Mum. She died just over a year ago at the age of 94. She attributed her longevity to eating chocolate every day (like you) and keeping kosher (not, I guess, like you—or me). I think I’ve already written too much about growing up Jewish in England. When I arrived in NYC I was astonished. I had never seen Jewish people have so much fun in my life. I liked being in the loud majority rather than the self-effacing minority.

Two things I’d like to hear from you about. The long nightmare of PC that we are both living through. I wrote a story called “Physically Correct” in my book Schoom that took on some similar stuff to “Appropriate Sex” (I liked your story better). What are we to do? I think the students are sick of it, but most of the teachers are still biting their tongues. Second thing: Jews. What’s your story there?

All best,


Jonathan