In an era marked by the short story’s loss of cultural heft, Charles D’Abrosio’s collection of stories makes that loss seem tragic.
The name of this short story collection by Charles D’Abrosio is taken from the title story, in which an immigrant wife can’t pronounce the word refrigerator, so she calls it the dead fish museum. Clever and a good hook (pun intended), but more than that, the theme of fish extends over the whole book. Characters often fish, usually for salmon, and the catch or non-catch determines the course of the story. Not only are fish a theme, but on the cover, each word is set on a typewriter key (referencing a story starring a typewriter mechanic) and the word “Dead” in the title is italicized, which serves as a second theme: the lifeless psychology of the protagonists.
D’Abrosio writes of orphans and Catholics, and sometimes orphaned Catholics. He covers the down-and-out painter who’s moonlighting on set design for a porn shoot, an insurance seller at a family reunion whose wife is cheating on him, the couple doing a charity scam in corn country. Although there’s occasionally a snapshot of a hopeful moment, the narrative is shorn of all sentimentality. D’Abrosio keeps it raw, rarely letting his characters glimpse any form of redemption, and many of the characters seem so empty they probably wouldn’t accept change even in light of their grim circumstances.
These short stories slant toward the long side – not Deborah Eisenberg long, but lengthy – and six of the eight originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each one ends at an unexpected spot. Not that the endings don’t make sense in hindsight and resonate emotionally, just that before the last page is turned it’s impossible to predict the end of the text. They don’t climax and slide into the dénouement as much as seize a previous element in the story and twist it to provide closure. For instance, and while giving away as little as possible, a gun mentioned in the opening of one story disappears at the end. A family torn by arguments and betrayals is captured in a single moment of unification. And deep in the wilderness on a camping trip, a trio of characters shouts across the lake, the reoccurring echo representing the millions of others in existential crises much like their own.
