For Keepsies: Stories

Fincke possesses an unerring eye for the details of everyday life in blue-collar middle America. He lets us eavesdrop on bakers killing time until the rolls are ready to go into the oven. He places us on the assembly line at the Heinz soup plant to meet an insufferable foreman who cares more about productivity than about the safety of his workers. And while work is tedious, even dangerous, recreation offers little refuge. The IGA's Cleveland Indians lineup sweepstakes promises easy money but is designed to be unwinnable. The local package store promotes "Hop 'N Gator," a test market lemon-lime malt liquor that tastes suspiciously of the kinds of chemicals that are injected into laboratory rats.

Against this bleak background, Fincke's characters find themselves playing out their lives, uncertain when the game switched from "funsies" to "keepsies," and wistfully wishing that there were "do overs." The narrator of the title story bides his time in floury limbo as a baker's helper, waiting for his draft notice and ticket to Vietnam. Fetler, the middle-aged protagonist of "The Man Who Played for the Skyliners," returns to his hometown for a family funeral. Obsessed by the curse of his heredity ("blood pressure, rich food, unnecessary weight"), he hopes to ease his premonitions of early death in a one-night stand with the woman whose rejection of him in high school has come to symbolize the wrong turn his life has taken. And then there is feckless Sidway, the main character in "Six Letters, Starting with E." Sidway tries to escape the dinginess of his working-class neighborhood, only to find his dream house being botched by the shoddy work of indifferent contractors. The coup de grace is dealt when he finally reads between the lines of the "For Sale - Commercial" sign in front of the farm across the street and has premonitions of "a rash of trailers breaking out, an industrial park specializing in noxious fumes."

Pressing down upon Fincke's characters is the accumulated weight of self-inflicted screwups blended with cosmic injustices. The only thing they understand about life is its power to bring them pain. Watching the grim bewilderment of these members of the Silent Majority, it is easy to imagine them today, grown older and vociferously vocal, enticed by the appealingly simple solutions of Newt Gingrich.

DANIEL FRICK Franklin & Marshall College

COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning