Sam the Cat and Other Stories
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Sam the Cat and Other Stories |
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| Author: | Matthew Klam |
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| Publisher: | Random House |
Like a performance artist in print, Matthew Klam stands up here and delivers hilarious, shocking, high-energy riffs on the theme of modern love and all its complexities. One by one, these stories amuse, enlighten, and entertain. As a group, they mark the full emergence of one of America’s foremost young literary talents.
In the immediately engrossing title story, Samuel Beardson falls in love with a young woman across a crowded room who, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a bird-boned, longhaired, slim fellow named John Drake. In a single moment, “Sam the Cat” enters a sexual twilight zone, and a young man’s cocksure, womanizing lifestyle unravels: “There I am, horned out and at the same time queasy with the weirdness of it.”
In “The Royal Palms,” Klam’s overworked, newly monied hero walks out of a Caribbean resort casino with a pile of cash stuffed into his T-shirt. Beside him stands his wife, Diane, furious at herself for the cellulite that’s recently appeared on her thighs. Their marriage is at a sexual standstill. Then the sound of an old jeep spooks them, and the next moment they are running for their lives.
Having fallen in love with his girlfriend Phylida’s beautiful behind, the narrator of “Issues I Dealt With in Therapy” has flown to a Nantucket-like island with her for a wedding. He’s been asked to toast the groom, once a well-intentioned civil rights lawyer who’s grown into a sweating “Gore-guy,” a self-absorbed power pol, a hot, young, curry-barfing bulimic on his way to the White House. Phylida, meanwhile, is a sleepless, hypochondriacal medical resident. Among this cast of frank and foolish characters, we’re left to wonder if we have any control over whom we love.
Matthew Klam is an O. Henry Award winner, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and his generation’s most on-key singer of the boy-girl blues. The stories in Sam the Cat crackle with humor, intelligence, and style and add up to an outrageous, entirely original, and unforgettable debut.
“I loved Sam the Cat. What a great collection. The stories are brilliantly constructed. They make me laugh. Très slanky.”—Alice Elliott Dark
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Matthew Klam’s male narrators in Sam the Cat hate and need women in equal measure. By and large they’re not physically violent men, but they do possess a certain free-floating aggression—the byproduct of sad childhoods, dads who treated them like losers, and moms who weren’t quite all there. Indeed, throughout this troubling, masterfully written collection of stories, women never seem truly present, however central they may be. As the typically indiscriminate narrator of “Not This” explains, his girlfriend “fit my idea of the supreme woman. Why? Who gives a shit. We fell in love.”
In the title story, which catapulted the author into the spotlight when it ran in The New Yorker, a guy goes out looking to get laid, then finds himself hitting on a man in drag. Other potential mates turn out to be only nominally less ersatz, with eyes “like a plastic doll’s.” Klam’s men know that they’re supposed to locate love somewhere among these zombies, but they can’t find it, and this fills them with irritation and angry longing. Cumulatively, his stories paint a grim picture indeed: one of a bitter, stifled heterosexuality, leading straight to violence or to varying degrees of lifelessness. His taut, spooky prose recalls another connoisseur of erotic disappointment, Lorrie Moore. But where Moore is partial to neurotic women, Klam’s subject is the guy who wishes he could transcend himself and be redeemed from the small and angry America in which he’s stuck. —Emily White
