That's True of Everybody

by Mark Winegardner

Book Overview

The proprietor of a bowling alley whose artist daughter paints only phalluses. A ninth-grade girl who marries in haste only to be faced with her husband's impotence. A libidinous poet who learns the meaning of harassment. The life and loves of a professional lawn-mower. These are just a few of the distinctive stories that make up Mark Winegardner's remarkable debut short-story collection.
Winegardner, whose rich and epic novel Crooked River Burning...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156027364
• ISBN13: 9780156027366
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A major writer, fully in stride

I began reading Winegardner's work after hearing him read his funny and disturbing story "Keegan's Load" in front of a truly wowed crowd of about 1000 people here in Madison, Wisconsin. I bought his story collection that day, and was frankly shocked that all of it was as good as that story. I don't remember taking so much pleasure in discovering a writer since I first read Lorrie Moore. Since then, I have read both his novels -- The Veracruz Blues (excellent) and Crooked River Burning (a masterpiece). Winegardner is about to become pretty famous, once his sequel to THE GODFATHER comes out. He's a much better writer than Mario Puzo, so prepare yourselves. In the meantime, read this book now so that once Winegardner hits it big, you can pride yourself on being ahead of the curve.

Enormous heart and skill

This is a hell of a good book: audacious without being showoffy, full of heart without ever stooping to sentimentality. The first story, "Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home," is a particular stunner: that rarest of short stories--the sort that manages to get a 300-page novel into a 20-page story, without the effort ever showing.Many of these stories have showed up as Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories, and one, "Keegan's Load,"is in the new New Stories from the South (2003). He'll be a regular in those annuals for years, I bet -- unless he does such a good job with the sequel to The Godfather (don't be surprised if it's better than Puzo's) that he sticks to novels from here on. I doubt that, though. No one with this much evident love for short stories is likely to abandon the form.

best collection I've read in 5 years

I first read Winegardner with his epic, brilliant novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING, a book I can't recomment highly enough. It was a pleasure, and even a shock, to see him as at home writing short stories as he is writing a big, visionary novel.I'm not sure if there's any American writer who's been shortlisted as often for Best American and other prize anthologies and been overlooked by the annual judge. But it's important to note that the stories here that have had such attention--"Keegan's Load," "Song for a Certain Girl," "That's True of Everybody" (which appeared in TriQuarterly and is collected here as "The Untenured Lecturer") and "Ace of Hearts" are, as a group, as good a quartet of stellar stories as you're going to see from any writer the past five years.I very rarely give 5 stars to books, but this one blew me away.

Very enjoyable collection!

Mark Winegardner has followed his epic novel CROOKED RIVER BURNING with a fine collection of eleven stories that capture that that is essentially American. Going back to he Midwest of his youth, Winegardner, while seemingly straying from the mainstream with slightly out of normal characters, really does nail down things that are 'true of everybody.'Winegardner's stories are well-paced, quickly developing his characters in a manner that makes them both reliable as narrators and recognizable in some way. The language flows smoothly with an excellent and varied vocabulary. Though Winegardner is the Director of the Creative Writing Department at Florida State University, nobody would lump any of these stories into the 'cookie-cutter MFA' variety.Instead, his stories can be lumped together as efforts that burn with an energy, leading the reader to the conclusion, whether it be thrilling or not, at a rapid pace. While at times, it does not seem like an incredible amount is happening, the writing and tone keep the reader involved. That and a pretty sharp sense of humor, a fair amount of which could be considered black.The collection opens with "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home." The story revolves around Harry, the proprietor of a bowling alley in the Cleveland area of Ohio, his two daughters, and a lane girl who ends up going AWOL the day she is to receive her first check. Harry goes to visit his eldest daughter Debra for the opening of her new painting exhibit. Over dinner, Debra and her husband, whom Harry is not a fan of, explain that Harry might not be ready for her new muse; she paints nothing but phalluses. Harry ends up buying one of the paintings and having it shipped home in order to support his daughter. When he arrives home, Jane is out very late, and he has to come to the conclusion that the story title poses.What he has a difficult time doing however, in an apparent way of dealing with his daughters no longer needing him, is letting go of the fact that his lane girl just quit. He goes to the extreme of driving out to the address she listed on her application, and calling the phone number of her former residence in Nevada numerous times trying to verify she was okay. Throughout all of this, Harry is also going on dates via the personal ad section of local papers in an attempt to find somebody for himself.The story wraps up nicely with Debra having a baby and Harry realizing what a good father his son-in-law is, Jane moving in with the bartender at the bowling alley, the discover of a dead young woman turning out to not be the former lane girl, and Harry deciding that 'Someday, someone would hear what it was Harry Kreevich was really trying to say.'The middle of the collection contain a trio of stories: The Visiting Poet, The Untenured Lecturer, and Keegan's Load, under the heading Tales of Academic Lunacy: 1991 - 2001. These cover, in great detail and insight, topics that very easily could have gone under easy st

Huge Praise

I grew up in the mid-west in the seventies. When I remember the hot, dry summers riding my banana seat bike, the neighbor kid on a skate board behind me holding on to the sissy bar, I can smell the air and I can feel the sweat on my skin from the hot sun. When I think about the muted screams of the neighbor kids yelling from their snow forts to ours - the ones we built out of the three feet of snow that fell the night before - I can feel the stinging cold and my itchy scalp from my sweaty matted hair under my stocking hat. While I didn't get married in high school ("Song for a Certain Girl"), I don't suffer from narcolepsy ("Halftime"), and my parents never owned a business ("Last Lovesong at the Valentine" and "Thirty Year Old Women Do Not Always Come Home"), I know that Winegardner gets it right: the mood, rhythm, and vibe of these stories ring true. I felt the stillness in the summer air when I read, "Ace of Hearts," the sun on my shoulders when I read "Song for Certain Girl," and I could hear the crickets at dusk when I read "Last Lovesong at the Valentine." At the heart of the collection are three stories set in academia. I'm not an academic. But I felt no less moved by Murtaugh's failures, as a parent and as a human, in "The Visiting Poet." These stories took me to a place I'd never been, but a place that I could have been a thousand times. And you don't have to be from the midwest to appreciate that. Highly recommended.