The Bruce Is Loose

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By David Gates

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The flap copy telling the uninitiated what to expect in _B_The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman_b_ (400 pages. Donald J. Fine. $25) says it's "in the tradition of" the collected stories of John Cheever. Weird, but really no weirder than back when Friedman's darkly comic, note-per-feet novels "Stern" (1902) and "A Mother's Kisses" (1964) got him tagged, along with Heller and Vonnegut, as a practitioner of "black humor." He was lumped with Philip Both, too--Nelson Algren once called him more important than Both, Malamud or Bellow--for putting neurosis and sexual misadventure to literary use. But while Both never shucked his high seriousness, Friedman published in both The New Yorker and Cavalier, the Antioch Review and The Twilight Zone Magazine. Since his 1967 farce "Scuba Duba," he's had his greatest success with screenplays ("Splash," "Stir Crazy") and such diversions as "The Lonely Guy's Book of Life." The return to print of some of Friedman's best work is a bona fide literary event, but it must have been hell to package.

What will readers raised on Raymond Carver make of these stories? "The Man They Threw Out of Jets" (his first story ever) will surely whiten their knuckles: the queasy narrator is trapped in a small plane whose half-mad pilot hopelessly races four jets ("They were miles behind us, and suddenly they weren't") toward a looming mountain. But what about "When You're Excused, You're Excused," whose hero skips temple on Yore Kippur to go to Vic Tanny's? To prove he shouldn't feel guilty, he goes on to cheat on his wife, eat ham hocks, smoke pot and hide the body of a dead cop. In "Black Angels," an otherwise bargain-priced gardener charges $400 an hour for lending a psychoanalytic ear to his white employer. Five stories feature Harry Towns, the coke-snorting screenwriter who's Friedman's Pat Hobby. In "Lady," Towns shows up late for his dead mother's viewing, but vows to stay dean the next day because "anyone who stuck so much as a grain of that white shit up his nose on the actual day of his mother's funeral had to be some new and as yet undiscovered breed of sonofabitch. The lowest."

Only half these stories resemble the post-Carver realism now in vogue. Elsewhere Friedman exploits the conventions of pulp fiction--for years he worked as an editor at lowbrow men's magazines--and his fantasy parables might now be deemed subliterary for their snap endings and over-the-top fun. But deem again: beneath the fun, Friedman is plenty grim enough to gratify admirers of Thom Jones. Shame, anxiety, self-delusion and miscommunication drive his stories, and like Pinter or Mamet--or Carver--he makes his characters' blurtings into out-of-kilter poetry. "I'm just saying that I'm mad now," says one beleaguered, ineffectual, inescapably self-conscious character, "and when I am I'm suddenly articulate, fear no one and can get people." Cringe. That sounds like us, all right--that unconvinced, unconvincing bluster into the void. Are we having fun yet?

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