The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Beach Umbrella and Other Stories by Cyrus Colter
John O'Brien

Cyrus Colter. The Beach Umbrella and Other Stories. TriQuarterly Books and Northwestern Univ. Press, 1996. 225 pp. Paper: $14.95.

This volume brings together two collections of Colter stories, and it is a delight to see them back in print. Rather than re-reviewing them, I want only to draw attention to two of the stories that, to my mind, are two of the most remarkable stories ever written and rank along with anything by Chekhov. The first is the title story, “The Beach Umbrella,” which records a man’s visit to a beach in the waning days of summer, hoping there (together with his new beach umbrella) to make contact with others on the beach who seem always to have a wonderful time. The effort miserably fails, the sky is overcast, no contact is made, and the character readies himelf to return to his normal life, utterly defeated. The second story is called “Moot,” about an old man and his dog, the only creature with whom the man has any kind of relationship, and even this one does not work very well. Both die, and the story ends with workers showing up to clean out the junk (the man’s lifelong possessions) to make room for the next tenant. Both of these stories are composed in a completely dead-pan, matter-of-fact, numbing prose, a prose that piles one mundane fact upon the next, moving character and reader toward an ending that terminates any possibility for hope or change. They are brutal stories that lodge themselves in one’s emotional network, so that the perception of the world is pemanently altered.

To the naive, the stories will seem “old-fashioned,” but fashion has nothing (or should have nothing) to do with art, and it is the art of these stories that makes them so penetrating and disturbing. This is a very powerful book that no one should ignore. [John O’Brien]