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Jess Walter on the art of being underwater
Jess Walter's new book of short stories "We Live in Water" chronicles those who are down on their luck.
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There's a certain magic that comes with reading a good story. Even one that's not about a magical time. Which is to say, the last five years in this economy.
Novelist Jess Walter has a new collection of short stories out about people and the lives they've lived the past five years. "We Live in Water," it's called.
"We are in the midst of a recovery but when I look around my neighborhood I see what I think are yard sales, and then I look closely and I see it's everyone's funiture on the lawn because they have been evicted," says Walter. "So I do think we have left a lot of people underwater as we come out of this -- more than we even realize."
His collection is full of tragic characters -- the homeless, the drug-addicted and those who have lost everything to gambling debts. But it is not without humor. "I look in those lives for moments of redemption and light and humor," he says. "That's the thing that always draws me to a story is humor and, thankfully, you don't need to make $80,000 a year to have a sense of humor."
Yes, this is a story that needs to be told, and from a socioeconomic perspective rather than a "dismissed as a personal problem" perspective. We do live in a culture that has come to denegrate the poor and unemployed; to blame the victims of what should long ago have been recognized as a failed economic strategy, one rooted in the economic neo-liberal ideology that began in 1980 and has brought us to the edge of global financial collapse (and it ain't over yet, folks). Economist Lester Thurow once aptly pointed out (The Zero Sum Society), at the beginning of the era of the global downsizing of workforces in developed countries, that Japanese CEO's often apologized to their workers, feeling forced to lay them off in the interest of global competiveness, while American CEO's were more likely to blame their workers. In America, if you have, you have worth. If you don't have, you don't have worth, in the eyes of many Americans, and likely never will; possibly, for that very reason. Glad to hear there are a few people left around who recognize that as pure ignorance and arrogance, and would have others do the same.
