Short story collection review

The Dead Fish Museum

By Charles D'Ambrosio

Published by Knopf, U.S.

Here is writing to set racing the pulse of anyone remotely interested in reading.

The range and depth of the stories in The Dead Fish Museum is matched only by the attention to detail which D’Ambrosio has invested in every line. Here are multi-layered tales of masculinity, botched relationships, psychological breakdown, sexual desire and family tensions. The settings for each one may vary (a psychiatric hospital, the deepwoods of northern Michigan, the streets of Seattle among them) but these tales are all in some way about struggle and identity.

A burned-out screenwriter is admitted to a psychiatric ward, where he befriends a ballet dancer who sets herself ablaze; a pair of itinerant con-artists take advantage of an old couple’s grief for their dead daughter; a repairer of typewriters does the best he can for his autistic son; simmering violence breaks out among the set builders on a porn movie.

D’Ambrosio is also interested in the myths that build up in families, and the long-held grievances that fester until they burst. ‘Up North’ is a deep and thoughtful examination of the ploys that couples use to persuade themselves that their relationships are sound, but it also looks at the barely-contained violence that can exist between men, regardless of how well they know each other.

The action in ‘Up North’ is strongly contextualised by landscape, the winter snow symbolising the deadness lying beneath the sociable veneer of the characters. like many of the other stories in this collection the depressed screenwriter is incarcerated in Manhattan, that most hyperactive of cities; a young man seeks to come to terms with the death of his grandfather – and a large inheritance – at the edge of the continent, by a rivermouth choked with dead fish; a boy on a camping expedition in the High Divide learns from his father that his parents will be divorcing; and the setting for the title story (the porn one) is an appropriately thin-walled motel room and a boarded-up, fume-filled warehouse in a shitty town.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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