barmashI have struggled mightily with short story collections of late, because there are always a few self-indulgent clunkers in the mix, I read a page or two, and move on. Engagement in all walks of fiction is my entry point, whether it is slow or fast, I still need someone to love. A book should follow you around like a faithful dog, and when it’s not near by, you’re keenly aware of its absence.

Tom Barbash has been a wonderful discovery, much like those first moments of Ladies’ Man by Richard Price; Stay Up With Me has a youthful energy that is equal parts envy and excitement. In “The Break”, the first story in the Barbash collection, a son comes home to hang with his mother, Upper West Side, NYC, they go out for pizza and Mom notices how much her son has grown up. She is divorced from the boy’s father, but somehow misses her marriage through her son. The kid is attractive, charming, and getting in touch with those powers. He wanders out of the nest just long enough to catch the eye of the hostess at the pizza joint. The story turns on a knife’s edge, there is an intake of air, and we’re off. It’s a connection made then missed, but Mom still doesn’t know where she ends and her son begins.

banksRussell Banks left me out in the cold years ago. I probably drifted away after The Sweet Hereafter, which was so perfectly rendered that I couldn’t imagine it as a movie. When it did arrive in the theaters I openly wept during most of it. The sorrow was so purely visualized that I couldn’t control myself. As a collector of contemporary American fiction, Russell Banks is a prized chestnut, and I remember meeting him at a signing once, “Ahh, a collector,” he said. But if he knew how much his early work meant to me, he would have said something else I’m sure. There was review in The New York Times recently that compared A Permanent Member of the Family to early Carver, which is another reason to pick up any book, just to see if that’s true. The first story,”Former Marine”, is a bit translucent, but full of six’s and seven’s, and a pointed adventure about when your father runs out of money. The title story, “A Permanent Member of The Family”, is like a town you grew up in but can never go back to, and is slicker than deer guts.

Barbash travels down similar paths but with a breezy rock n’ roll swagger, like Richard Price’s screenplay for The Color of Money, Eddie Felson saying to Vincent, “the balls roll funny for everyone, kid.” I adored the story January, where a man realizes he is no longer the most important person in his mother’s life, and the guy standing between them is, even if this guy is risking everything for the right to be in this spot. I read the story holding my breath, mostly, waiting for things to end, the car to stop, and something good to happen. It reminded me of the classic Carver story, “A Small Good Thing”. Barmash distills these tales to their most urgent essence, and there is no better example of that than the title story, “Stay Up With Me”. When a couple gets to a point where it’s just as messy to be away from each other as it is to be together, then you know there was a significant amount of “on the ground research” training to come to that conclusion. The father in this story had just the right amount of detail, and Barmash is great at deciding if three sentences of description will do, or if the characters need four or five sentences spread out over several pages, or in some cases, just one. In “The Women”, a story so good that I could read it once a day and never get bored, Barbash delivers a New York City that I remember as dirty and magical. A young woman is left with her newly single and handsome father, and he discovers a Manhattan that is teaming with available women. The daughter is witness to her father’s dalliances, as much as she is a victim of her own sadness. The scene where the daughter jogs the reservoir, and waves to the skyscrapers, put me right there with her.

Russell Banks and Tom Barbash have written my two favorite books of 2013. I loved & Sons by David Gilbert, poured gallons of ink on it, and rightly so. These collections came to me in those solitary moments during Christmas, the same exact time last year when I was reading an advance copy of Mr. Gilbert’s masterpiece.