| One word sums up Leonard Nash’s You Can’t Get There From Here, poignant. While it is well written, and the stories are entertaining, they don’t leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling. In this book Nash presents the reader with two sets of short stories that paint a bleak picture of the blue collar side of life. Working stiffs making minimum wage dealing with love (romance), sex, birth, death, and not much future. Nash portrays a side of Florida that most tourists don’t glimpse during their short stays. Nash’s characters could be the people I worked and played with through my twenties and early thirties.
The first set of stories “You Can’t Get There From Here,” from which the book takes its title, provides the reader a collection of stories about everyday life – workers with dead end jobs, no extra income, and lots of debt, shitty relationships, and spouses dying of cancer. Yet they keep on going, and don’t even realize things are going badly. Nash does a good job of portraying real people coping with life one day at a time. Nash’s characters leave you with the impression they are just surviving life, and not really living life. Even when provided with an alternative, his characters play it safe and stay with what they know rather than take a chance.
In “Legal Tender,” the main characters have divorced, tried it on their own, but end up back together because it is what they are most comfortable with. Not any happier than before, but at least not alone. In the title story “You Can’t Get There From Here,” the main character Garvey, can’t sleep at night so he hangs out at the local diner. Besides Garvey, there are two other regulars and the waitress, Irene. Garvey has always lived in the neighborhood which is suffering urban blight. He manages the local Winn Dixie grocery store. He rarely drives, and has never loved. Irene offers to run away with him to the west coast. She will drive, and even pay for most of the trip. Despite how bad his life is, Garvey is not willing to take a chance. He and Irene settle on a date instead of running away.
The second set of stories, “No Deposit, No Return,” involves a University of Florida Law School graduate, Adam. He has just graduated, and his live-in girl friend has left him. Not much of a surprise considering she never unpacked after moving in. Adam’s father is dying of cancer, his mother has a new boyfriend, and Adam is not ready to grow up or commit to anything. Adam meets a new girl friend, and they share several stories together while the father is dying.
In “No Deposit, No Return” Nash develops a theme of life offers choices, but you have to make a choice. Adam can’t decide whether he wants to go left or right, so he continues to go straight. Only straight is getting him nowhere fast, and leading to a result that he doesn’t want. Nash tells the reader through his stories life is about making a decision. Don’t waffle between decisions until there is no longer an opportunity to make a decision because life will make the decision for you.
Even though the stories evoked sad emotions because of the story content, they were written well, and entertaining. Personally they brought back memories of growing up in Florida, and friends not thought about in years. Living in cheap apartments with furniture acquired from friends that had moved on. The recliner held together with duct tape. The coffee table acquired from the trash heap. People enjoying life while earning minimum wage.
BGS 6/17/2008
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