The Angel on the Roof

Notes

When I began writing, I wanted to be a poet, but had not the gift and fell in love instead with the short story, the form in prose closest to lyric poetry. In the intervening years, I’ve written a dozen or so novels, but the story form thrills me still. It invites me today, as it did back then, to behave on the page in a way that is more reckless, more sharply painful, and more broadly comic than is allowed by the steady, slow, bourgeois respectability of the novel, which, like a good marriage, demands long-term commitment, tolerance, and compromise. The novel, in order to exist at all, accrues, accretes, and accumulates itself in small increments, like a coral reef, and through that process invites from its creator leisurely, circumambulatory exploration. By contrast, stories are like perfect waves, if one is a surfer. Stories forgive one’s mercurial nature, reward one’s longing for ecstasy, and make of one’s short memory a virtue.

As this book is published, I am turning sixty, and these stories represent the best work I have done in the form over the thirty-seven years since I began trying to write in prose — at least that’s my hope. Rereading them has been like visiting my past and all-but-forgotten selves, the man I was (and was not) in my twenties, thirties, forties, and so on. To my surprise, the youth who wrote “Searching for Survivors,” one of the earliest of the stories included here, although a somewhat melancholy and self-dramatizing fellow, turns out to be not significantly different than the quickly aging man who wrote the most recent, “Lobster Night.” I suppose that should comfort me, but in fact it does not. It is, however, why I have arranged these stories thematically and dramatically, rather than in chronological order or by the titles of the collections in which they originally appeared. Because I was, when young, in many crucial ways the same writer I am today, I have felt free to take the old stories and set them beside the new, to recontextualize them. This has let me see them freshly and has allowed me to put them to a different use than when they were first written and published. In that way, in the making of this book, I’ve been able, despite my similarities to the younger person who has been using my name for these many years, to become a different writer than I was without it.

Twenty-two of the thirty-one stories selected for this volume were published in four earlier collections and have been revised for this edition. Nine are recent and uncollected. Among the early stories, I chose to include only those that did not on rereading make me cringe with embarrassment (several were written, after all, when I was in college) and that did not seem to require more than light revision. Most of the stories that I left out — and there were many more excluded than included — were failed experiments which were necessary for me to have attempted, for I would not have learned my craft if I had not written them; and while I now wish that I had not submitted them for publication, I nonetheless must admit that, if I had not published them, first in magazines and later in books, I doubt that I’d be able today to recognize them as failures. If I had tossed them out while they were still in manuscript form, strangled my darlings in their beds, as it were, I would not have learned from them as much as I have: in cold print, those stories taught me what I have no talent for or no abiding interest in.

From the beginning, my desire to write stories has been aided and abetted by editors who themselves love the form, and I would like to thank them here for that. Foremost among them is Ted Solotaroff, who published my stories early and often in American Review and New American Review and later edited the collections Trailerpark and Success Stories for HarperCollins. Then there is Daniel Halpern at Antaeus, Andy Ward and Rust Hills at Esquire, Mark Mirsky at Fiction, Joe David Bellamy at Fiction International, Rick Barthelme at Mississippi Review, William Phillips at Partisan Review, and the late James Boatwright at Shenandoah. I’m also grateful to Robert Jones, my present editor at HarperCollins, who escorted this volume into print with all his usual intelligence, tact, and energy. And finally, I especially want to thank my agent, Ellen Levine, who has been my faithful sidekick right from the start.

For those who care about such matters, I have listed here the previously collected stories under the titles of the collections in which they originally appeared.

From Searching for Survivors (1975):

“Searching for Survivors”

“With Ché in New Hampshire”

“Theory of Flight” (originally “With Ché at Kitty Hawk”)

“The Neighbor”

“The Lie”

“Defenseman”

From The New World (1978):

“The Rise of the Middle Class”

“Indisposed”

“The Caul”

From Trailerpark (1981):

“The Guinea Pig Lady”

“Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat”

“Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan”

“Comfort”

“The Burden”

“The Child Screams and Looks Back at You”

“The Fisherman”

From Success Stories (1986):

“Queen for a Day”

“The Fish”

“Success Story”

“Mistake”

“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”

“Firewood”