Ate It Anyway: Stories

A sad undercurrent meanders throughout Ed Allen's collection of short stories, "Ate It Anyway." The Flannery O'Connor award-winning volume for short fiction focuses on middle-class America and its failed quest for a meaningful and lasting happiness. The characters usually speak about their inner lives in a confessional-style prose. Often the protagonist will reminisce about a past that seemed so much better than it truly was. The opening short story, "River of Toys," encloses a revealing thought, "A neighborhood is whatever anyone wants to remember about it." What makes the characters poignant is their self-knowledge of drowning in the mire of an average life they abhor. The notion is most striking in "Burt Osborne Rules the World." The short story's title soon becomes apparently oxymoronic as the character of the title's name laments, "I could have done a better job of being Burt Osborne." He peaks during sixth grade, the height of his unique individuality, and then dives headlong into mediocrity. In short, Allen covers the terrain of an unfulfilled life like a consummate foreign correspondent. Memory turns out to be an ever-increasing bubble that holds characters within its isolated limited world of the past while pushing out the possibilities of living in the present and having any hope of a joyous future. Bohdan Kot