05/01/2023
Despite its title, this collection from Adams (Against the Current) doesn’t center on rent or healing flesh, though one of its several hell-raising young people does, in the years just before the Korean war, burn his initials into his arm with chemistry class acid. Instead, Scar Songs sings of hearts bruised and toughened by experience, over the course of a lifetime, starting with a young man’s shock at the thoughtless cruelty of the adult world in the treatment of a shoplifter in the opening story, “The Catcher,” or another—possibly the same—young man’s encountering of Mexican authorities in the border-crossing centerpiece “The Last Tequila Run.” The latter’s a richly complex story that builds to the narrator’s understanding of the most evergreen betrayal of the young by the old: the young getting sent off to fight and die in the old’s wars.
Adams balances coming-of-age tales (including the knockout “Too Late Nathan,” which deftly blends past and present) with stories of adults bearing up under the weight of accumulated scar tissue. “The Music Messiah,” perhaps the collection’s most atypical story, finds the narrator, a well-regarded music jazz journalist, eager to interview a returning titan of the tenor sax, back on the scene but still laying somewhat low after years away. The saxman’s tale—blending elements of several jazz greats’ biographies—is a moving account of healing from loss, addiction, and more, while striving to show others a path forward, too.
The power of art also fuels the painfully comic “Winter Break,” a story that concerns the primal pain of teaching material one cares for deeply—in this case, a story from Joyce’s Dubliners—to students. Its form and technique echoes Joyce but also jazz, building to an epiphany whose language suggests a dazzling solo … and also the pain of loving art and culture so deeply in a society that doesn’t. Adams’s stories are crisp, incisive, briskly told dispatches about living on in spite of it all.
Takeaway: Incisive short stories about persevering as life scars us.
Comparable Titles: T.C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake,” Richard Yates’s “A Really Good Jazz Piano.”
Production grades Cover: B Design and typography: B+ Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A-
2023-04-20
Male characters struggle with identities, loyalties, relationships, and precarious situations in this story collection.
Prolific author Adams plumbs the needs, desires, joys and troubles of male protagonists within these nine tales, beginning with a teenage grocery store clerk reluctantly monitoring a possible shoplifter in “Thief Catcher.” The challenge is heavy for a young person—to balance job retention while expressing compassion for the economically disadvantaged shoppers in his store. The tale expertly mines themes of humanitarianism, morals, and grace. While “The Last Tequila Run” may sound like it's set at a frat party, it’s anything but. Two drunken friends with “tequila-bloated brains” illicitly venture into Mexico, get stopped by aggressive U.S. border patrol agents, and divulge secrets that blow apart their longstanding friendship. Some stories address the toll of creating art; in “The Music Messiah,” a journalist is obsessed with interviewing a tenor saxophone jazz legend who just returned from a Zen monastery where he’d hoped to exorcise his demons. In “Winter Break,” an English teacher struggles to keep distracted, entitled students interested in discussing James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). There are other scars to witness and life lessons to be learned throughout Adams’ memorable collection, like the drastic consequences of keeping family secrets in “Ever After,” in which a husband hears a lifetime of crushing confessions divulged by his wife on her deathbed and then finds sympathy and grief impossible to fathom. The titular tale is perhaps the most affecting. It recounts the history of two brothers—one mourning the death of the other—in a spare story suffused with melancholy and anchored by the indelible love of family. There’s lots to savor and ponder here. While Adams’ seasoned storytelling entertains, it also explores fraternity, family, and the challenge of navigating life’s pains and pleasures.
Brimming with resounding themes and notable characters.
