American Fiction, Short Story Collections (Single Author), Italian Americans - Fiction & Literature, Italian Fiction

Make Me Work: Stories

Name: Make Me Work: Stories
Author: Ralph Lombreglia
ISBN: 9780140242225

by Ralph Lombreglia

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Overview

Ralph Lombreglia's first collection of short stories, Men Under Water, established him as a powerful new voice in contemporary American fiction, the author of "sublime comic triumphs" (Douglas Seibold, The Chicago Tribune) that culminate in an "inexplicable, stunning illumination that shines suddenly on life and transforms it forever" (William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review). In Make Me Work, Lombreglia offers nine new stories, many of them first published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. With a delightful spontaneity that belies meticulous craft, Lombreglia presents a kaleidoscopic array of characters - young and old, male and female - captured at surprising, revealing moments of their lives. In the title story, a man finds himself, while having his hair cut, at the mercy of the best friend he betrayed. In "Late Early Man," video producers stumble from the marvels of technology into the miracle of life; in the sequel, "Heavy Lifting," the process is unforgettably reversed. "A Half Hour with God's Heroes" portrays a sharp, earthy working-class mother who tries to use the powers of a saint to escape her delinquent son. And in "Piltdown Man, Later Proved to Be a Hoax," the mysteries of race and class confront two schoolboys who play at an insane asylum. Heartfelt and charming, funny and serious, Make Me Work is a dazzling performance by a writer with "an unerring sense of the ridiculous, and a very subtle tenderness, too" (Richard Bausch, USA Today).

With truth, wit, and a masterful high style, Lombreglia captures a varied cast of quirky characters who, with awkwardness, humor, and sometimes grace, struggle with tensions between creativity and commercialism, technology and humanity, alienation and connection.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Nine engaging short stories by the author of Men Under Water show thoughtful, conflicted protagonists striving for equilibrium in their personal relationships and finding hints of meaning in the acutely perceived oddities of contemporary American life. Living primarily on the fringes of academia, media and the arts, the characters are not quite comfortable with either their surroundings or the times. Lisa, a classic-rock disc jockey in small-town Vermont, plays blues songs to get over her ex-husband, an Elvis fanatic. Walter, an actor by trade, writes copy for industrial videos in Boston and discovers the miracle of birth against a backdrop of high-tech laser pranks. Karl, a moderately famous composer back in the 1950s, now labors over a piece inspired by his heart arrhythmia and grumbles as his young protegee/lover heads to New York to pursue performance art. Hoping to escape her drug-addicted son and head for Florida, Josephine buries an icon of St. Joseph in her lawn to expedite the sale of her house. Although he sometimes overdoes the '60s nostalgia, Lombreglia combines a sharp eye for weird, resonant detail with a fluid, understated narrative style to achieve work that is both serious and farcical, outlandish and immediate. (Jan.)

Library Journal

In Men Under Water ( LJ 3/15/90), Lombreglia exhibited a sharp pen that cut straight to the heart of a matter and an equally keen wit that viewed each situation and its participants with wry humor. The nine stories in this volume follow the same pattern, focusing on slightly quirky people adding their own interpretations to everyday life. In ``Late Early Man,'' a video producer finishes up a rush project while keeping in touch by cellular phone as his wife gives birth in the back seat of a Bonneville on the way to the hospital. The title story shows two feuding friends reconciled by a haircut, although a good Italian meal sets them up to begin again. Best of all is ``Can You Dance to It?'' in which three philosophy professors contemplate saving a colleague from deportation by marrying her. At once offbeat and serious, these wonderful stories cannot fail to charm the reader.-- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.

Louis B. Jones

"These stories are both funny and profound, highlighted by lights and deep darks....From the first sentence, you find yourself relaxing, soon you find youself loving his world, wanting to meet his friends." -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Lombreglia's second collection, half from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, is no less witty and accomplished than his first, Men Under Water (1990). His offbeat humor survives the polished surfaces of these nine superb tales, with their Zeitgeisty gestures. Pop music is an index to character in the delightful "One- Woman Blues Revival," in which a young female deejay, estranged from her Elvis-fanatic husband, finds a hero in a Polish ‚migr‚ mechanic, who plays a mean blues riff. Music also figures in "This is a Natural Product of the Earth," the story of an East Coast amateur musician who follows his girlfriend to California, where he reunites with an old lover, herself lost amidst the Sixties burnouts in Berkeley. Two stories set on college campuses actually breathe life into a somewhat wheezy genre: "Can You Dance to It?" is a clever piece about a bunch of professors who force a local bartender to marry their colleague, an Argentinean philosopher whom he's gotten pregnant and who's threatened with deportation. And "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor" follows a former music prodigy's later academic career. Meanwhile, Catholicism and ethnicity provide context to a number of pieces: in "A Half Hour with God's Heroes," a divorced woman who works as a chef turns to superstition to help her sell her house so that she can leave behind her bungled life in Boston—her larcenous husband and her junkie son. "Piltdown Man, Later Proved to Be a Hoax" is a boy's tale worthy of Salinger, in which the famous fraud becomes a symbol of life's disappointments. The title piece is an unconventional romance between an aging Italian hipster and a tough-talking beauty from the North End of Boston.Finally, two linked stories about a group of thirtysomething video producers wonderfully explore contemporary relations. Lombreglia brings a unique sensibility to familiar material—smart and stylish and, surprisingly, profound.