Release Date:  February 19, 2013.  Simon and Schuster

I’m a fan of the short story.  A good short story can do more in 15 pages than an entire novel in 600.  There is nothing quite like that gut punch you receive, and the helplessness you feel, at the end of a Raymond Carver or John Fante story.  When I find a new collection, especially by an author I’ve never heard of, I get all giddy like a 15 year old Bieber fan (That’s what the kids are still listening to right?  I’m not quite in the loop).

Jim Gavin’s Middle Men is that new collection.  I’ll try to refrain from gushing too much in the interest of being viewed a serious critic, but this is the best collection I’ve read in the last year.  It’s both hilarious and devastating, and at times, at least for me, hits just a little bit too close to home for comfort.  The title refers specifically to a two part story at the end called “The Luau” and “Costello” about middle men in the sales world, but works to encompass the entire book as well.  The characters are stuck in that middle part of their lives, that frustrating and seemingly meaningless part where nothing seems to happen and personal and professional failures seem to mount endlessly.  The setting is in and around the city of Los Angeles, and if there is a better locale for people who are stuck in purgatory than Hollywood then I don’t know of it.

Then there is the time period.  All the stories are set in the 1990’s.  Gavin sums up the decade and the place with simple language, always a welcome tactic for me, with lines like.  “It was 1992.  Our shorts were getting baggy and Magic had AIDS.”  This direct prose, two short sentences, sum up everything you need to know.  It gives us the time period and we learn something of the narrators personality and humor.  Funny and cynical, it sums up the entire collection rather well.  Gavin’s a bit older than me, but I’m most definitely a child of the 90’s and that probably helps me identity with his characters.  It helps that I grew up in basically the same area.  I’ll be honest, it also helps that throughout this entire collection, characters are either listening to, or watching, Dodger games.

The two specific stories that got to me most are “Elephant Doors” and “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror.”  The first is a story about Adam, a struggling stand-up comic who also works as a production assistant on a game show as his day job.  The story is framed around the game show host, Max, manipulating Adam into stealing his dog back from his ex-wife, while in between we get a glimpse of Adam’s non-existent career as a comedian.  In one of the most dead on renditions of life as a comic, Gavin gives us the true futility of standing on a stage in front of a bunch of drunks and other comics, who all hate you.  Adam’s set opens with “I finally found the self-help book that’s going to unlock my potential.  It’s called Mein Kampf.”  He then deals with the inevitable silence of opening with such a tasteless, and just not very funny, joke.  This story captures perfectly the feeling of being in on the fringes of show business.  That spot where you’re a nobody, and it’s worse because you’d like to be a somebody.  The story ends, fittingly, with Adam taking his place in the comedy club, ready to make a fool out of himself again, because what else is going to do with his life?

The other story I want to talk about, and I’ll be brief, “Bewildered” deals with bi-polar disorder.  The first serious short story I ever attempted writing was about more or less the same thing, and wow does Gavin do it better than me.  Using a mental illness to illustrate the failings of the world around us is not a new concept by any means, but here it’s used with enough sympathy and absolutely no sentimentality that it seems fresh and tragic and moving.

If this collection has a failing, it’s that some readers will find it a little on the boring side since it can be construed that nothing really happens.  I disagree, but if you’re more drawn to stories that have actual danger and action to them, then this probably isn’t the ideal fit.  It slides into the category of “bored suburban kids who suddenly realize they don’t have a place in the world.”  I put that in quotes because someday I feel that will be a real genre.

My final thoughts:

There are two basic narratives that continuously come up concerning L.A.  One focuses on the seediness and the underground sleaze that’s so ironic in such a city of supposed glamour.  These are your Bukowski’s and your crime noirs.  Then there are the stories that focus on the glitz itself, like every reality show ever created.  I will concede a third, that’s kind of derivative, and that’s where the glamour and glitz hides an inner seediness.  Death Becomes Her comes to mind, maybe?  I don’t know why that movie is what pops into my head, but I’ll go with it.  There is nothing wrong with these narratives, in fact a lot of times they can be quite well done, it’s just that we’ve seen them time and time again.  People tend to forget that Los Angeles is actually a really, if unforgiving, city with real people facing real struggles and have perfectly reasonable ambitions.  I think this is why it’s refreshing to see Gavin tackle the real city.  He shows us these people stuck in between the sleaze and the glamour, struggling through their daily lives.  Hollywood is ever present in their lives, but it’s not always the driving force.

Buy this book!