A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both

Like Green Day did for punk rock, and The Matrix for kung-fu flicks, this new collection from New Yorker editor Greenman could well become an advocate for the short story with those who haven’t been interested in the form. Amusing, palatable and featuring some safe innovations, it’s precisely the sort of thing that can gain a new audience for a genre.

Greenman’s greatest skill as a writer derives from his formidable wit; nearly every page of Circle contains a solid joke. In “Oh Lord! Why Not?” the pop-singer narrator laments a new technology that allows anyone to craft a catchy pop song, instigating an epidemic of melody and forcing the authorities to impose a one-pop-song-per-capita limit. A young girl named Lee-Lee, who works in the Burger Man restaurant the songwriter now franchises, has had a modest hit with “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! (There’s a Frog in My Pool),” but her mother’s song “Come on Now Inside and Warm Me Up” is rising, with Lee-Lee on backup vocals: “‘Inside, inside,’ she sings softly as she stands over the grill, ‘Me up, me up.’” Along the way, the narrator tries to harness his thwarted ambition and make meaning out of his life when his hopes have been outlawed.

Were Greenman as adept at building depth into his stories as he is at integrating humor, his work would be on par with that of George Saunders for its imagination. Unfortunately, often the joke is the thing for Greenman, and the pathos comes across thin. In “A Field Guide to the North American Bigfoot,” unchanged images of a Sasquatch appear above simple descriptors: tired, alert, hungry, enthusiastic. Eventually it’s revealed that Bigfoot is depressed about his ex-girlfriend’s plans to marry his mortal enemy, Alan, and is even contemplating suicide. It’s amusing, but also disappointing, as Greenman lets the joke of the repeated images become the story rather than a device.

Still, like a gateway drug, Circle may work for those seeking entry into what’s being done in contemporary short stories. It’s funny, it occasionally stirs, and it shows promise in a young writer.— Jonathan Messinger