"Final Vinyl Days" and Other Stories (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Book

With titles such as "Dysfunction 101," "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us," and "It's a Funeral! RSVP," it's clear that when you open Jill McCorkle's Final Vinyl Days, you're not signing up for Remembrance of Things Past. Still, if Proust grew up in the newly air-conditioned South, listening to Marvin Gaye and sneaking contraband cigarettes in the local graveyard, who knows, he might have produced tales like these. Garrulous, earthy, and firmly grounded in the most mundane details of life, McCorkle's stories strain at the edges of their slight plots. The pleasure here lies mostly in listening to these voices run on--and they do run on, in monologues both withering and affectionate. "He was real handsome, when he was all cleaned up, but I couldn't stop thinking of his head as a maraca, like the ones I loved to shake in elementary school; he had little tiny specks of information rolling around in his head and making enough sound that he didn't seem like a zombie," one narrator recalls of an old boyfriend. McCorkle is a master of both the properly placed italic and the telling pop-culture detail; the mistress of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" announces, "I'm the test wife and he tries everything on me first, I mean everything. Remember when he got hooked on the massage oil that heats up with body temp? Now maybe you liked it, but I sure didn't. I got a rash, but of course, I have extremely sensitive skin and always have. I mean, I am Clinique all the way." Not all of these stories are funny--the divorced mother of "A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World," for instance, runs on little more than fear and adrenaline--but even those that are have strong undercurrents of tragedy. The narrator of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" wryly trashes her own big "peasant" feet, tells the wife to make her husband behave, confesses her loneliness, then makes herself disappear: "But don't let him off easy. Pitch a blue blazing fit. Scream, curse, throw things. Let him have it, honey. Your husband is cheating on us. Let him have it. And when all is said and done, please just forget that I was ever here; that I ever walked the earth. After all, I'm Big Foot. Who knows if I even exist." Divorce, sibling rivalries, missing parents, and deathbed advice: only McCorkle could shine a light into these dark corners of the human heart with such good grace and wit. --Mary Park Read More