Instructions for a Funeral

Starred review from January 15, 2019
Means' fifth collection cements his reputation as one of the finest, and most idiosyncratic, practitioners of short fiction in contemporary literature.The 14 stories here revolve around themes of dislocation, in both the personal and the collective realms. Means begins with a declaration: "I've been writing stories for thirty years now," he observes, "many published, others not published but trashed, put to bed, dead in the water....There's simply no way to distill or describe what's in the stories, except to say I attempt, to say the least, to respect whatever each story seems to want." The conditionality is revealing; in many ways, it marks the ethos of the book. Stories, Means is saying, don't happen to us so much as they grow out of us, which makes them connective in the deepest sense. And yet, as is also true of the work in his previous collections, connection is fleeting, illusory, incomplete. In "The Chair," a father tries to discipline his young son even as he understands the gesture to be futile in a larger sense. Every moment, in other words, contains the seeds of its dissolution. "As I lifted him and felt his weight," the narrator reflects, "the purity of the moment vanished and I would smell the stale, tart odor under his collar while he smelled, I suppose, the smoke and coffee on my breath and something else that later, at some point, perhaps even in memory, he would recognize as the first hints of decay." The title story, on the other hand, looks at things from the other end of the telescope: an older man's instructions for his funeral, written (as it must be) while he is still among the living; "Everything, right now, is safe and cozy," the story concludes. Think about the implications of that sentence: a man sitting in the drowsy security of his own existence, writing lines to be read by someone else after he is gone.In this magnificent book, we find the stories of every one of us: absent and present, dislocated and connected, at the mercy of our history, our narratives.

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Starred review from February 1, 2019
With his debut novel, Hystopia (2016), Means proved he is a gifted long-form storyteller. But his follow-up, his fifth story collection since 1991, affirms his position as one the best story writers of his generation. His sinewy, digressive prose moves seamlessly in and out of dreams, memories, and anticipation, defying time and forming riveting meditations on longing and regret. A group of recovering addicts in Farewell, My Brother sneaks out of their halfway house to share cigarettes and stories of their shortcomings. In The Terminal Artist, a woman's death haunts her friends years later when they learn that her nurse was a convicted mercy killer. A tussle outside a bar gradually reveals a love relationship built on classist assumptions in Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950. Some of the most intimate pieces are those centered on family life. In The Chair, a stay-at-home father struggles to balance authority and fear in his relationships with his toddler son and ambitious wife. As in his previous work, Means' protagonists have a lot to confess. But what might feel like rambling or ranting reveals an abundance of hope and heartache in the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)