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May 28, 2000
Inside the Men's Room
The guys in Matthew Klam's first story collection are fairly
clueless
By Scott Leibs
What do men want?
The characters in Matthew Klam's stories don't so much grapple with this
question as sag under its weight. They stumble from one misadventure to the
next and end up exhausted and confused, like frat boys the morning after.
Suffer as they might, they also entertain, often hilariously, and
occasionally they move us. Klam's protagonists - or perhaps one should say
protagonist, since they are virtually interchangeable - capture perfectly
the faux-sophistication of today's younger generation, where heightened
sexual awareness is forever trumped by general cluelessness. They're like
the rest of us - they just don't know it yet.
The collection begins with a story in which a man breaks his girlfriend's
heart by developing a crush on another man. It ends with a story in which a
similar character sits surrounded by women on the eve of his wedding:
"Nobody cared that the husbands weren't coming. About two hundred years of
accumulated married bliss among Rich's mom and four sisters, (and) his
cousins, fell away like a scab with no sign of injury beneath it. They were
discussing the impact of Oprah. It was sickening."
These stories aren't the best in the collection, but they make fitting
bookends: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Klam goes deeper than that, deep into the darkened heart of the modern
American male. The women, though rendered with faults, are usually
blameless. The men exhibit a Freudian field day of neuroses, conflicting
desires, Oedipal urges and general anxiety about pretty much everything.
It's no coincidence that one of the best stories is titled "Issues I Dealt
With In Therapy." In it, a couple travels to an island resort for a swanky
and carefully scripted wedding that succumbs to a memorable improvisation.
In this as in another of the best stories, "The Royal Palms," Klam works to
great effect by putting a troubled couple in collision with another couple
in a place far from home. When he keeps his lovers at home and isolated,
his stories occasionally succumb to a sort of whiny navel-gazing: Emotional
and narrative inertia mingle, and the effect is flat. He's on much firmer
ground when he generates plot. With multiple characters and entanglements
to work with, his humor is sharp and his honesty breathtaking.
These stories are limited in scope; all chronicle the love-life woes of a
confused but winsomely sympathetic young man. All are told in the
first-person except the final and longest story, "European Wedding."
Despite Klam's efforts to spread his wings a bit, by shifting perspective
from one character to another and weaving a complex family history into the
event at hand, that piece will feel quite familiar to those who have read
the other stories in the collection.
But Klam works two additional ingredients into the mix with excellent
results: the effect of money on relationships, and the curious forms that
male rivalry can take. In "Linda's Daddy's Loaded," a young couple lack for
nothing because the bride's father, a network newsman, underwrites their
life. In "The Royal Palms," the protagonist's big night at a Caribbean
casino will ripple throughout the story. In that same piece, the appearance
of an ersatz Adonis complicates (and perhaps redeems) the narrator's
marital troubles, while in "Issues I Dealt With In Therapy" the tensions
between former friends lead to one of contemporary literature's most
memorable toasts.
Not long ago, The New Yorker dubbed Klam one of the 20 most notable young
American authors. Funny, surprising and often fearless, these stories mark
a strong debut, and promise better things ahead.
Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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