Pieces for the Left Hand

January 26, 2009
Lennon muses in brief, deadpan vignettes on mortality and progress in a small New York university town. Grouped under seven rubrics that range from the prosaic (“Town and Country,” “Parents,” “Children”) to the existential (“Mystery and Confusion,” “Doom and Madness”), these segments catch the unnamed narrator, a 47-year-old married man living with his professor wife in a renovated farmhouse and with ample time to walk, in moments of self-reflection and thoughtful observation on happenings such as a disused road’s disappearance from a map, or how an under-construction water pipeline becomes a lethal joyride conduit for students. Or he wonders how his cat has obtained another cat’s collar; why he sometimes feels like an intruder in his own home; and how dreams and memory often play tricks on him. One segment aims at exposing the sadness of an acquaintance who struck it rich, but it can’t quite prove that money doesn’t buy happiness; riffs about artists and professors poke fun at the charlatans and theorists of the trades. Occasionally withering and frequently hilarious, these anecdotes highlight little knots of human curiosity.

March 1, 2009
One hundred deftly written short stories, originally published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Set in a quiet college town in upstate New York, the stories are each less than a page long. In the introduction, we learn that the narrator is a 47-year-old unemployed man who, while taking walks, turns his life's memories into tales. Some of the pieces feel like they have been cribbed from real life and some are obviously products of a fertile imagination. They can lean toward the macabre:"Copycats" unravels a student's inexplicable suicide, while"The Cement Mailbox" deadpans the tragic consequences of local tomfoolery. For the most part, though, the offerings are darkly funny, barely believable, but always readable slices of life.

A sly collection of bar stories and fables from Lennon (Castle, 2009, etc.), who's learned to be crafty with his storytelling.

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