What do you do when the gorgeous long-haired creature whom you've spotted from across the room turns out to be a guy? Or when your own brother asks you to donate sperm to impregnate his wife? How do you cope when your best friend is transformed from a clever, decent bloke into a fat, supercilious git? Or when a roast chicken suddenly becomes the symbol of your greatest shame? SAM THE CAT distils the comically painful truth about young men and women trying to get on with each other and with their lives.
Matthew Klam's male narrators in
Sam the Cat hate and need women in equal measure. By and large they're not physically violent men but they do possess a certain free-floating aggression--the by-product of sad childhoods, dads who treated them like losers and moms who weren't quite all there. Indeed, throughout this troubling, masterfully written collection of stories, women never seem truly present, however central they may be. As the typically indiscriminate narrator of "Not This" explains, his girlfriend "fit my idea of the supreme woman. Why? Who gives a shit. We fell in love."
In the title story, which catapulted the author into the spotlight when it ran in The New Yorker, a guy goes out looking to get laid, then finds himself hitting on a man in drag. Other potential mates turn out to be only nominally less ersatz, with eyes "like a plastic doll's." Klam's men know that they're supposed to locate love somewhere among these zombies but they can't find it, and this fills them with irritation and angry longing. Cumulatively, his stories paint a grim picture indeed: one of a bitter, stifled heterosexuality, leading straight to violence or to varying degrees of lifelessness. His taut, spooky prose recalls another connoisseur of erotic disappointment, Lorrie Moore. But where Moore is partial to neurotic women, Klam's subject is the guy who wishes he could transcend himself and be redeemed from the small and angry America in which he's stuck. --Emily White
