by Peter Orner
The line at the end of “The Poet” is from William Meredith’s “The Wreck of the Thresher (Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963)” from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (Triquarterly Books / Northwestern University Press).
ALSO BY
PETER ORNER
Esther Stories
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
Love and Shame and Love
AS EDITOR
Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives
(coeditor with Annie Holmes)
Praise for Peter Orner’s
LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Top Ten Books of the Year, John Williams, New York Times
A Best Work of Fiction in 2013, Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Best Books of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle
“A new story collection reaffirms Chicago-born author Peter Orner’s storytelling mastery.… ‘Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts?’ Why, indeed? This question is what drives Orner’s latest. In stories about premature death and inexplicable divorce, about nightmares and one-night stands, he skillfully blurs the lines between fiction and fact, between memories retrieved and those long forgotten, to suggest that great art is always born out of an acute awareness of the abiding disconnect.… What Orner may be telling us through the stories in this collection is that we are all artists grappling with the terrible facts of life and that our novelty act is living itself.”
—Shoshana Olidort, Chicago Tribune Printers Row
“The opening sentences of Peter Orner’s lapidary stories are irresistible invitations to read further.… These very short tales… range without straining over a great expanse of time and experience.… With this new publication and with the recent reissue of Mr. Orner’s 2001 collection, Esther Stories, this is an ideal moment to appreciate a master of his form.”
—John Williams, New York Times
“A magnificent and moving mosaic of remarkable narratives.… Orner’s poetic attention to language and ability to compress, to linger astutely and affectingly in the essential moment rather than become overly and unnecessarily consumed by the ‘what next?’ questions and concerns of plotting, are perhaps the greatest strengths of his writing.… Even the shortest pieces in Orner’s second collection leave one with the sense that all we truly need to know of these characters, of their circumstances, plights, and yearnings, is right there for us on the page.… The lengths of these stories seem irrelevant (and, for that matter, perfect) when one considers the power and weight of these essential glimpses. Taken as a whole, as the sum of its parts, this is a stirring and important book, one that will wash over readers and create a sensation similar to that of moving slowly through a museum, encountering masterpiece after masterpiece.”
—Skip Horack, San Francisco Chronicle
“What connects the stories in Peter Orner’s pulsing collection is dauntless brevity. The stories, which run between one and eight pages… have sweated away the fat of plotting and scene setting without weakening the vital organs of emotional resonance.… Mr. Orner packs remarkable pathos into his condensed dramas.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Orner’s work strikes home gently, but with devastating impact, and his characters impart their haunting message: ‘In sleep, they breathe their finite breaths.’ ”
—Jay Atkinson, Boston Globe
“Orner’s devotion is to his characters, to storytelling, and finally, to readers.”
—Nick Healy, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Whether you agree that short stories ought to be classified or you insist, like Orner, that a story is a story no matter how long, you’ll find all these realistic fictions intriguing, humorous, and sometimes poetic in a Turgenev-prose-poetic sort of way.… There’s something of the badass DNA of Babel, Cheever, and Welty here for everyone.”
—Joseph Peschel, Daily Beast
“Peter Orner is a true writers’ writer, which is to say a writer writers complain to writers about readers not reading. His novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo… ranks high among the best works of fiction about Africa ever written by an American, and his collection Esther Stories contains work to rival that of David Means and Tobias Wolff. Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge is bundled into four sections and includes more than fifty pieces of fiction.… Imagine Brief Interviews with Hideous Men written by Alice Munro.… Orner’s sentences don’t pop and glitter. They’re impressive, but quietly so, like skywriting.”
—Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine
“No, we won’t last. But the stories we tell ourselves sustain us in ways we never would have suspected. Mere anecdote rarely achieves profundity, yet it does here.”
—Ann Beattie, Electric Literature
“In Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Peter Orner has written a séance of a book—moody, tragic, sacred by turns—with Sherwood Anderson among the spirits in attendance, but also Al Capone as channeled by Geraldo, a murderously funny scene, which is in and of itself worth the price of admission.”
—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago
“Orner’s crystalline sentences and his ability to pay close and sustained attention to small moments transform the ordinary elements of each story into an even more astonishing whole.… Orner can nail interior monologue in a way that recalls Grace Paley.… Every story in Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge is excellent, incisive, moving.”
—Lauren Groff, New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully wrought tales.… In the tradition of short-story genius Grace Paley.… Like Paley’s heroines, Orner’s women take their own measure, and then they accept the results.… What leavens the anomie of his characters is the author’s invented idiom and the hard poetry of his prose. Embittered or not, his men are alive.”
—Susan Comninos, Forward
“Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge is a testament to the way people change stories and stories change people—that when you tell a story, it isn’t always a measure of who you were then, as much as it speaks to who you are now.… Orner captures his characters’ voices without exploiting them, using plain language to surprisingly poetic ends.… Ultimately, it’s what is remembered rather than what actually happened that is most important.… There are no throwaways in Orner’s work. And he doesn’t feel obliged to outline the passing of time or shifts in perspective.… Throughout, Orner makes quick and quiet moves, voltas, if you will, and doesn’t ask for permission or feel the need to ramp up to things. He seems to trust himself, and we should too.”
—Luke Wiget, The Millions
“Radiant.… There’s a curiosity in Orner’s work, the need to seek out stories and lives well beyond his own sphere, and there’s a necessary humility as he does this seeking.”
—Peter Mountford, Tin House
“Orner’s… stories, despite their length, are big, universal, with Orner working it and working it, until he hits the gold vein of the unknown.… Themes knit the stories together: family, death, politics, death, memory, and the significance of story and storytelling itself.… The superglue of this collection is language. The compression of it—the pressure to say a lot with a little.”
—Nina Schuyler, The Rumpus
“You wouldn’t think someone could haunt you with a life that spans just a few lines, but Peter Orner can. He can tell you an entire ghost story, and you won’t stop believing it until the next welcome specter chases it away.”
—Mia Lipman, San Francisco Journal of Books
“Orner’s stories exult and serve remembering and the heartbreak that so often attends it.”
—Kate Petersen, Rain Taxi
“Once again Peter Orner has produced a masterful and compelling collection of short stories.”
—Suri Boiangiu, Jewish Book Council Reviews
“Now we have Last Car Ove
r the Sagamore Bridge, by Peter Orner, one of our best and most adventurous writers. He’s always empathetic toward his characters but presents them as they are, in prose that is penetrating and clear in the manner of the old and wonderful masters. By casting a wide net and depicting so many and various souls, he urges us toward recognition of the transcendent—the beauty of it all, the one big soul.”
—Daniel Woodrell, author of The Maid’s Version
“It’s a testament to Orner’s empathy as a writer that such varied narratives ring so true.”
—Thomas Gebremedhin, Vogue.com
“In so many of Orner’s stories, there are illuminating variations on these Chekhovian themes: loss and longing; the yearning to be somewhere else in order to be someone else; the attempt to make sense of the past; and the struggle to regain or define who one is.… Empathy is one of Orner’s great strengths, and we can’t help but experience it with him.… All readers of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge will be offered the opportunity to become co-creators, the best, if not only way to ‘complete’ any work of art; and most are likely to feel that they have been enriched in a profound way by Peter Orner’s extraordinary exploration of the modern human condition.”
—Gerald Sorin, Haaretz
“In Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Peter Orner is mining a deep vein of human experience—of crooks, politicians, poets, killers, lovers, brothers, and sons. What he comes up with is a true work of art that will make you think, ‘Oh, this is how it’s done.’ ”
—Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
“The stories of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge confirm what I’ve long suspected: Peter Orner is one of the most accomplished writers of our generation. Yes, he is a master craftsman; every word is nailed down, and there isn’t a sentence, or even a sound, out of place. But he’s something else besides—a savant of the soul. Think Grace Paley, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Bowles, then add Bruce Springsteen’s rhythm and overwhelming loyalty to humanity, and you get close to Orner’s fierce, gorgeously poetic, heartbreaking prose.”
—Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
“Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge is a ravishing collection, full of wisdom, grief, beauty, and especially surprise.”
—Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collectors
“A kind of dark kaleidoscope of American moments, when both the powerful and powerless wonder, ‘Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts?’ ”
—Pamela Masin, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge is an incredible achievement. Peter Orner has a daring imagination and a voice all writers yearn for; he has joined the masters of the short-story form.”
—Chris Abani, author of Graceland
“Orner is still intent on revealing the quiet terror and melancholy of everyday life in America.… He is one of our most empathic writers today.… Stories are how Orner’s characters relate to the world. Through them they experience their own abstract pain, their intimate shame, and unsurprisingly, their most profound recognitions. Narrative is for them a coping mechanism and a way of life. Orner’s fiction has an intimate feel: we are in conversation with otherwise unknown and forgotten lives. This is what makes Orner’s characters live and breathe beyond the page.… This is how his clean, simple sentences succeed far beyond the limited space he gives them.… Let us be thankful for Peter Orner.”
—Nicholas Miriello, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In the gorgeous stories of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Peter Orner chronicles beauty and loss (and often hilarity) in the same rush of breath.”
—Cristina Garcia, author of King of Cuba
READING GROUP GUIDE
LAST CAR
OVER
THE
SAGAMORE
BRIDGE
Stories by
PETER
ORNER
A CONVERSATION WITH PETER ORNER
Do you have an earliest memory that you are willing to share?
Sometimes I wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but are we remembering the story and not the actual event? My parents took us to Europe when I was a real little kid—I was four or something. It was a disaster. I tried to push my older brother off of the Eiffel Tower. It’s just one of those family stories that gets told and told. But I actually remember being so pissed at him as to try to do that. He deserved it. He was needling me about French words I didn’t know. I was four. I was supposed to speak French?
Did you have this theme of memory and how we tell stories in mind when you started writing the first story for this collection?
I think it’s always been this sort of obsession. There’s a great Chekhov quote that I used in my second book, a novel about Namibia called The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He says, “The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.” That line always echoes in my head. Sometimes when something happens, something big, the first thing you want to do is tell somebody. That’s almost more exciting than the thing itself. Maybe it is more. And there are times this happens almost simultaneously with the experience; you already begin narrating it while it’s happening. If there’s a theme, and I’m never conscious of theme when I’m working, but in hindsight, this is it: how the telling of something influences the thing itself.
There’s that very famous quote at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Do you feel that way about your stories? None of them are particularly upbeat.
Tolstoy knew what he was talking about from experience. [laughs] I think that maybe happy families don’t need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they’re so busy living that they don’t actually step back and talk about life, as Chekhov suggests is our habit. Totally as an aside, I prefer Chekhov to Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a working theory—a beautiful and nuanced working theory—and he set out to prove it in the most devastating way possible. Chekhov is more ambiguous, which is why he’s a story writer maybe. So I agree with Tolstoy’s quote completely, but I also feel that there is always more to it. What is a happy family and what is an unhappy family? Families are usually both things at the same time. This said, I find a lot of false lightness in the world. I try to write stories based on what I see out there, which is, yes, a lot of darkness amid moments of light.
The settings of your stories are very specific. Do you usually start with a location?
I usually have a place and then I put the character there. For instance, I love place names, especially Midwestern place names. Pigeon Falls, Wisconsin. Fort Wayne, Indiana. Zion, Illinois. But I think I’m tricking myself by being so specific—if I use a real place, the story set there suddenly becomes real to me. All the things I’m inventing out of whole cloth start being more possible if I set a story down on a sidewalk in Chicago or in a hotel room in Buffalo, Wyoming. Then I just watch my characters interact with each other.
A few of your characters, like Walt and Esther, pop up throughout the collection. What made you keep coming back to these characters?
Walt has been around for a long time. He has been around since Esther Stories. He appears in Love and Shame and Love and he appears in this book a number of times, and then he’s also in the new book I am writing. He’s a furniture salesman in Fall River, Massachusetts, and a kind of lay philosopher who talks to himself a lot. He’s roughly based on my grandfather, who died at fifty-nine when I was really young. Though I hardly knew him, I have these incredibly vivid memories of him. He was what most people in the world would consider an ordinary guy—sold furniture, ate at the Howard Johnson. But I inherited all of his books, and through this book collection of his I feel that I’ve gotten to know him. He wasn’t so ordinary. Who is? The man didn’t go to college, but he had this incredibly curious mind that I only learned about after his death. And one
of the weirdest things he did—I’ve written about this—is that he collected phone books, and he had every year of phone books from Fall River, Massachusetts. I was always wondering, “Why would he do that?” and I don’t know exactly, but I think that he was really interested in names. I like to think of him sitting there, just reading all of these names of people.… Even in a smallish town like Fall River, can you imagine how many names there are in the phone book? It kind of boggles the mind. Esther, as you say, also recurs. She’s a woman who had a very tough life—she was so beautiful and had so much potential, but things happen. You know? And I’m interested in how people go so astray, from themselves, from their families. There are a lot of people like Esther in Sagamore Bridge, characters whose expectations have been somehow thwarted. I find this very human. I think there is something almost heroic in the ways that people endure even when their lives have turned out so different from what they’d dreamed.
How much do you know about your characters? Obviously Walt’s different because he appears in a lot of your stories, but often your stories dive right in—do you know the beginning and the end yourself? Or are you discovering them as you’re writing, knowing only as much as the reader knows?
Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately but change completely—so that the familiar becomes unrecognizable—and then stories about everybody else in the world—the strangers who I am fascinated by, and through writing about, do my best to get to know. One story in this book—“Plaza Revolución, Mexico City, 6 a.m.”—a tiny piece about a woman in Mexico City, is just based on somebody I saw walking in the morning, and I wanted to know what her life was like. Of course I couldn’t just run up to her. “Hey, I’m a writer; what’s your story?” But this image of a woman walking across a plaza in Mexico City at six o’clock in the morning carrying television antennas to sell—it stayed with me for years. I think one of the reasons I write is to get to know better the people I think I know, and the people I wish I knew. Getting their stories down is one way of taking a stab at the mysteries that are right in front of us every day.