Crazy Funny

Well, the only heavy hitting I can recall was my chin falling to my chest as the generally humorless fiction collected there lulled me to sleep. But D’Ambrosio’s contribution to the book, the marvelous story “Screenwriter,” was different from the others: funny, engaging, superbly crafted. It is also one of the standout works of his new story collection, The Dead Fish Museum, which follows on his 1995 debut, The Point.

Eight stories make up The Dead Fish Museum, six of which originally appeared in the New Yorker. But “Screenwriter” is the most representative of D’Ambrosio’s fiction: Its hilarity despite dark subject matter, its highly original prose style, and its treatment of a man struggling to maintain sanity (a theme of many of the stories collected here) are all typical of Charles D’Ambrosio.

“Screenwriter” begins with an irresistibly funny question: “How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private?” The question is asked by the unnamed narrator, who we learn is a rich and immensely successful Hollywood screenwriter. Yet something has gone very wrong in his life: His producer-wife has left him for the star of his latest film, and recent thoughts of suicide have obsessed him to the point where he’s checked himself into the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital.

Many writers would make such a character gloomy, maybe even a bit pathetic. Not D’Ambrosio. Indeed, his screenwriter announces early on: “I’m not whining–I’m not one of those whiners,” and treats us to a hilarious portrait of the psych ward. Asking an older patient named Carmen for a match, the screenwriter gets treated to a monologue on the woman’s lifelong misfortunes. Remembering conversations with other patients, he observes: “Illness was our lingua franca. Patients announced their worst infirmities right off, but no one dared talk about normal life. Oh, no–that was shameful and embarrassing, a botch you didn’t bring up in polite conversation.”

It is just this concern with other characters and their problems that saves the story from looking inward and growing self-involved. The unreality of Hollywood life has given the screenwriter a deep need for the real and truthful, and he finds it in another resident of the psych ward, a ballerina who’s obsessed with burning herself. D’Ambrosio’s prose in describing her is among the best in the book, and shows his talent for surprising, imaginative turns of phrase:

“Screenwriter” is not the only first-rate work in this collection, however. It begins with the brilliant “The High Divide,” which recounts a friendship between a troubled young orphan named Ignatius and his well-off counterpart, Donny. At first it seems the boys have nothing in common: Ignatius lives in a Catholic orphanage, his psychotic father wasting away in a nearby hospital, while Donny’s wealthy family is a picture of happiness.

But when Donny’s father invites the boys to go hiking in the Pacific Northwest, the illusion of happiness is shattered: Donny’s father confesses that he’s seeing another woman, has decided to divorce Donny’s mother, is under immense psychological strain, and suddenly Donny is forced to live through the same painful emotions his orphan friend has endured.

The title story, “The Dead Fish Museum,” is equally compelling. A carpenter named Ramage, who once had ambitions of being a filmmaker, is in need of cash and agrees to build the set of a porn movie with two other workers, one black and the other an immigrant from El Salvador. The story, rife with racial and sexual tension, introduces a third conflict when we learn that Ramage has been carrying a loaded handgun in his tool sack and has been planning to shoot himself (“The gun was his constant adversary, like a drug, a deep secret that he kept from others, but it was also his passion, a theater where he poured out his lonely ardor”). The story moves uneasily toward a resolution as the set is built and the movie shot.

Even more electric is “Up North,” which tells of a Thanksgiving hunting trip in northern Michigan. The main character, Daly, makes the trip with his wife Caroline, who he knows has been cheating on him serially (he’s been reading her diary). Daly is haunted by his wife’s past confession that she was raped at the age of 18, but here D’Ambrosio ratchets up the stakes tenfold: The rapist was not a stranger but a friend of Caroline’s father–one of the men who’ll be at the lodge in Michigan. For the entirety of the trip, Daly will seek to discover the identity of the rapist and will grapple with questions of fidelity and familiarity.

“It was as if she were determined to revisit, over and over, that original moment of absolute strangeness,” Daly reflects. “And yet she continued to need the scrim of familiarity I offered, so that the world would fill more sharply with the unfamiliar.”

The other stories here do not live up to the high standard set by these four. “Drummond & Son,” the tale of a father in Seattle caring for his unstable son, drags in places and does not feature the surprising, original prose we see elsewhere. “Blessing,” the story of a young couple settling into a new home, is a bit of an earnest bore. Two others, “The Scheme of Things” and “The Bone Game,” test the reader’s patience by treating of largely unsympathetic, uninteresting characters.

Still, when D’Ambrosio is at his best, he is writing about troubled yet highly sympathetic characters in stories rife with tension and conflict. This he has done in the four absolutely first-class stories in this brilliant collection–“Screenwriter,” “Up North,” “The High Divide,” “The Dead Fish Museum.” That he gives us memorable characters with hilarity, mixing a high and low tone, makes him something of an American Baudelaire, and that’s not faint praise.

Stephen Barbara is a writer in Hoboken, New Jersey.