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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 byproduct 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
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