We Live in Water audiobook

Now…you know what we know.” Her voice went even lower. That nobody chooses. That we’re all sick. We’re all here.” One wonders how many times the author misspelled the title. I guess the stories do not live in Walter any longer but are out there for us to enjoy, although I am not sure that is the right word. Appreciate, maybe. There are various forms of sickness in Jess Walter’s baker’s-dozen collection of bleak stories. Alcoholism, drug addiction, obsession, greed, dishonesty, some zombification, or the most incurable of all, being born poor. The megafauna all glooped up in La Brea had as much of a chance to escape their situation as the characters in these tales, although some of Walters’ people do make an effort. The setting is mostly Spokane (or in this case Spo-can’t) with a few outings to Seattle and Portland, and even a road trip to Vegas. Jess Walter - image fr0m LitHubThe town, btw, is named for the Native American tribe, whose name means “children of the sun.” No sun children here. I am not sure the sun ever breaks through the overcast, but when it does, it is quickly clouded over. Or it might indicate the eye of something unpleasant wandering by. The first story, Anything Helps simply knocked me on my ass. Wayne Bittinger, aka Bit, is homeless, reliant on the Jesus beds for an occasional mattress, descending to cardboard when he must, an experienced beggar, a fellow with alcohol issues, and with a son who has been taken in by some religious sorts. He needs permission from the state to see his own kid. The light in his world used to be reading Harry Potter books to his child, but now he has to scrounge nickels and dimes to buy a single book, and then has to break some laws just to get it to his son. Bit may have brought some of his misery onto himself. Choices had clearly been made, bad ones, but were all his problems of his own doing? His rough go pounded on some of my fears. I, too, loved reading Harry to my progeny. And while I have never had to live on the street, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that in today’s compassion-free America I might someday get to have the experience. No substance issues for me, yet, at least not since I stopped smoking in 2002, but I related like a brother to Bit, and sobbed on reading this story, big, heaving, wailing tears, fuh real. I was reminded of Baskin Robbins while reading this book. Thirty one flavors, it seemed, but of pain, despair and failure. Walter offers a portrait of the underclass, looking at people who have made bad choices, people who have been cast in dark dramas by a hostile director, and relationships that seem likely to be noted on page one headlines of the wrong sort. One saving grace lies in some of the parent-child connections. Bit’s love for his child is palpable, even if his ability to express it is limited. Other fathers attempt to protect their young. But there is an undercurrent. While outcomes are often the result of bad decisions, the environment as a whole seems designed to keep people in their places. This enclosure may not be as concrete as Stephen King’s dome, but it contains its residents quite well anyway. In fact, the core image is one of being trapped. I won’t give away the specifics of it, but let’s just say that the people here might as well have checked into the Hotel California. Hell, most of ‘em were born there. There are the odd bright spots. One decent guy prevents his boss from screwing a customer. One convict truly wants to do some good in the world. The oft-mentioned Bit really, really does love his kid. A convict on temporary release finds a golden moment on the outside. A father relates his own childhood to that of his kids, in a warm and useful way.Walter’s characters are significantly flawed, more often than not. You may not feel quite the connection I did to Bit, but there are likely to be at least some folks on these pages who ring your bells, tug at your heart, and maybe lift your wallet.Along with the dark content, considerable skill is on display here from the author of Beautiful Ruins and The Zero. We Live in Water may offer up a polluted lake, but it is still worth diving in, just to see what else is swimming around.==============================The StoriesAnything Helps - see aboveWe Live in Water - a low level crook finds that screwing the boss’s wife and stealing his money is not a good career move. The son he loved and tried to protect, comes back many years later to find out what happened to dad.Thief - when dad sets out to find who has been nicking change from the vacation savings jar, he must confront his own childhood behavior.Can a Corn – a con on a medical leave chooses a form of freedom usually denied him. Some powerful imagery in this one. Ken reeled in a dull catfish, yellow-eyed and spiny. No fight in it. Almost like it didn’t mind.Virgo - An obsessed and rejected lover uses his position at a local newspaper to make life difficult for his ex, resulting in collateral damage.Helpless Little Things - Every short story collection, it seems, needs an O Henry entry. In this one, a latter day Fagin meets his match.Please - A father seeks to remove his son from the mother’s meth-lab home Don’t Eat Cat - a zombie tale, that says more about how people can become undead (underclass) than it does about their behavior once turned, and how the uppers view of the unders (reminiscent of the UK telly series In the Flesh, which is highly recommended, btw))The New Frontier - nothing JFK-ish here – a Vegas trip with a pseudo friend looking to save someone who may or may not need savingThe Brakes - a mechanic does a bit of good for an undeserving recipientThe Wolf and the Wild - a white collar criminal doing community service aims to make a better life for himself and those he is assigned to Wheelbarrow Kings - a couple of down-and-outs scrounging to make a buck and contending with their lack of knowledgeStatistical Abstract for My Hometown of Spokane, Washington - like it says, a portrait of despair, by the numbers, and telling the narrators tale, in numbered paragraphs, mixing stats and personal info8. I was born in Spokane in 1965. Beginning in about 1978, when was thirteen, I wanted to leave.9. I’m still here.Review first posted July 15, 2013Published February 12, 2013

Five stars. With a bullet. And a syringe. And some helpless, hopeless wailing.I met Walter at ALA and he signed his book for me. To tell the stark truth, I was wandering around, saw him signing books in the Harper Collins booth and thought, "Hey, that's a short line...", and even though I'd never heard of him, I bellied up to the free book bar. By such small cusps one's life may change. As Donne said, comparisons are odious. But there was a name that kept ringing in my head as I read these stories. Walter puts me in mind of Raymond Carver in all the ways that matter. His people are my people, the ones I grew up with, the ones I ran away from, the ones I turned into. There are no winners here, no rescuers, no happy endings. There's only today, and tomorrow, which will be like today only maybe worse. The same, if you're lucky. A lot worse, more likely. There's humor here, smoky and reeling, but still funny as hell. I can't recommend these stories highly enough. I want to read every word this man has ever written, but I can't do it all at once because I'm pretty sure if I did I'd crawl in my coat closet and huddle there till I died.

Upon completion of this book of short stories, I feel like I’ve taken multiple personality disorder to a whole new level. First, I panhandled on the street corner watching the BMWs and the Mercedes and the Lincolns drive by; then I slept with a married woman and stole money from my bookie; then I hid in a closet behind my coveralls with the lights off, staking out my kids on my day off from Kaiser Aluminum with a six-pack next to me; next I fished with another man on the lake instead of taking my dialysis treatments; then I decided to stalk my ex-girlfriend, to the point that she went back to her no good ex-boyfriend who had cheated on her with another woman because he was a good listener; then I conned kids into passing out Greenpeace brochures in the middle of a Portland mall; next I was divorced and worried about my son staying with his mother and her druggie boyfriend; then I found myself in the middle of Starbucks-Financial on the verge of the apocalypse witnessing a zombie attack; next I hightailed it to Las Vegas to kill the shithead who turned my sister into a whore; then I had to deal with a senile, racist older woman who liked to use the term nigger like she was at a bridge club meeting and we were back in the stone age; then I picked up trash on the side of the highway with a guy named Ricky who compared futures to black holes; next my mouth watered at the thought of cinnamon rolls and chili and scones and Hot Pockets and pretzels and sandwiches and oat bars and muffins and Sun Chips and pepperoni sticks and I planned to wash it all down with a Dr. Pepper; and last, I sat up in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a shotgun to guard my bike because I’d broken the lock and failed to acquire a new one in a timely fashion.Instead of having a particular story or two that stood out in this collection, all of the stories in WE LIVE IN WATER: STORIES captured my attention. Each one seemed like the perfect length to tell the tale, the characters coming alive in bursts as short as 2 pages or as long as 24, the staccato rhythm more powerful than machine gun fire, with dark times and dark characters hovering around me like a swarm of bees.1. “Anything Helps” – If I stood on the street corner long enough, not my usual spot but my second choice, with my hand held out and a pitiful expression painted on my face, I might end up with enough coins and bills in my pocket to buy my son the latest Harry Potter book. 2. “We Live In Water” – If I could just find out what happened to my father and that no good whore who caused him to stray from the chicken coop, when he needed a few bills back in the day and managed to get a little something else on the side, I might set my conscience in the right spot. 3. “Thief” – If I sat in my closet long enough, the air hanging over me like a fog, the clothes shoved against my cheeks, huddled in the back like a squirrel with a mouthful of nuts, the cans of beer getting warm at my side, I might know whether it was little, middle, or the girl who needed a few extra quarters.4. “Can A Corn” – If I cast my line just right, the air slapping against my face, my friend yapping away at my side, I might actually forget about my fucking dialysis treatments. 5. “Virgo” – If the pissant ex-boyfriend, Mark Aikens, the one who cheated on Tanya because he couldn’t keep it in his pants, ever got wind of my stalker tendencies and my level of intensity, he might renege on the no-contact order and actually move to Mars or Jupiter, and I could get my life back, before I resorted to tweaking horoscopes.6. “Helpless Little Things” – If I had known I could have Greenpeace and save the whales and keep the scam going until I was a happy man, I might have done a few things differently.7. “Please” – If I didn’t have an ex-wife who chose loser boyfriends with choppy attitudes and who just happened to be maladjusted members of society, I wouldn’t have had to worry about my son. 8. “Don’t Eat Cat” – If I hadn’t witnessed a zombie attack two years earlier at Starbucks-Financial and been turned down by the government for an operation, I might not have chased after the one that got away.9. “The New Frontier” – If my best friend Bobby hadn’t chased after his sister Lisa like some half-crazed loon, collecting nudie cards from snappers like they were government handouts, visiting every strip club within a ten-mile radius until “my balls feel like they’re going to explode” and I lose “my sense of chivalry, having a constant erection,” I might have enjoyed myself a bit more in Las Vegas.10. “The Brakes” – If the old bitty had developed just a bit more sense and my fellow mechanics had seen a bit of integrity instead of dollar signs, I might have been able to shield my son from the ensuing madness.11. “The Wolf And The Wild” – If I hadn’t been forced to volunteer for sophomores and second-graders with names like Megan and Drew and J’mar and Tania and DeAndre and Macro, I might not have realized the shitty state of our educational system.12. “Wheelbarrow Kings” – If I hadn’t been forced to wheel a TV that was five feet by five feet by three feet, in a wheelbarrow with a bum wheel with a friend that had arms the size of pool sticks on a muggy day, I might not have scored my latest bump and some Sun Chips.13. “Statistical Abstract For My Hometown Of Spokane, Washington” – If I had left Spokane, Washington in a timely fashion, like the 2,632 illegal aliens that had been deported, I might not have had my bike stolen twice, been stalked by some crazy-assed man that liked to punch himself for fun and not been surprised by a bad neighborhood every three blocks.But, then, I might not have discovered and enjoyed this book.Cross-posted at Robert's Reads

A well-known writer friend once asked me: “Do you enjoy writing?”“Yes,” I answered, surprised. “I love it. How about you?”“I love it too,” he answered. And then he went on to tell me this is not the case for most of the writers he knows.Writing is the great joy of my life, and if we are a small club of people who have never claimed that creation is agony, I would guess that Jess Walter might be our president. We Live in Water is an absolute joy to read, and I cannot believe he didn’t experience joy while cranking it out. The stories range from heartbreaking to hilarious, and the writing—the guy has chops! I feel his joy in every word. He loves describing people so vividly that you feel them. He loves low-key but eviscerating social satire. He loves cleverness. And he loves mashing together social satire, cleverness, and heartbreak. This is the third Jess Walter book I’ve read and it is my favorite—a wonderful little anthology of stories.

The thing about failure is that it’s never really over. Even after shuffling off this mortal coil, your failures reverberate like ripples in a pond, carry into lives left behind. Jess Walter, in his exquisite collection We Live In Water presents twelve men, Disciples of Failure, whose stories we read after their choices have been made, their lives already in a state of deliquescence. Walter takes the snapshots we make every day in our mind’s eye and crafts the stories behind the moment. The men sitting with cardboard signs at freeway on-ramps: Anything Helps; the convicts picking up trash on the side of the highway: The Wolf and the Wild; the young people harassing you for a moment to talk about Greenpeace or Save the Children on your way into the grocery store: Helpless Little Things; the women behind those stripper cards handed out in seedy Las Vegas: The New Frontier. We wonder “Who are these people? How did they fall so low?” What we turn away from, what we are afraid to imagine, Walter follows through, coloring in the empty space of our imagination.Children, young boys – are often the focus of Walter’s many touches of grace. These boys represent the potential of goodness, perhaps what these men were like before the world ground their faces in a mud puddle or before greed, anger or addiction became their motivating forces. In The Wolf and the Wild a little boy aches to curl in the lap of a convict, to read the same picture book over and over. There is no point in taking a chance on something new – the familiar is the best comfort a lost little boy can hope for. The son in Anything Helps rejects his father’s gift, but with such compassion you know you are seeing the act of a youth who is becoming a man before his time. In the collection’s title story, a single moment - the blue glow of an aquarium - releases a man’s childhood memory of his father’s disappearance. Walter also takes us where no man has gone before: the future. In one of the most imaginative stories, Don’t Eat Cat, set in Seattle’s Fremont district just a few years hence, an epidemic of zombies is taking over the city. But within the futuristic oddity runs a current of reality. These zombies have a disease, a horrific effect of the addiction to an anti-depressant. Owen, who loses his cool in a Starbucks after a zombie messes up his order, points out “But is this the Apocalypse? Fuck you. It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit. All I’d asked was that is be better managed.” Yep. Get that. Walter wields a deft hand with black comedy. Virgo is devious, written in first-person by a stalker who plots revenge on his ex-girlfriend by sabotaging her daily horoscope. The New Frontier, has the making of a bromance buddy caper: two guys travel to Las Vegas to save the sister of one her life as a hooker in Las Vegas. The brother is a goob. His buddy, who recounts their mission, is, well…Jess Walter closes with a thirteenth piece. Less a story than an ode, an explanation, a litany, Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington is a bullet-point list of the failures of a tired-but-trying city and the reasons why Walter chooses to remain. I don’t mean to make the short stories seem like complete downers. There are no happy endings here; in many cases there are no endings – these are moments, suspended in the time it takes to read the few pages you get. But Walter has this way of imbuing his stories with a gentle caress of humanity and not a little humor that saves his characters’ voices from becoming maudlin. At the same time, we are spared the soft focus of sentimentality because the edges are raw with grief or pointed with violence. I applaud him for giving the Pacific Northwest a dimension of character that overrides the clichéd image of rugged landscapes and frontier spirits.After reading this collection, it’s a done deal: in my book, Jess Walter is one of the greatest of contemporary American fiction writers.

It’s probably not fair for me to continue to review Jess Walter’s work. He is, without a doubt, my favorite author and as such could write assembly instructions for IKEA that I’d give all the stars. This writer can bring a reader to tears, elicit snorts of derision and induce gales of uncontrollable laughter—all at the same time.These short stories are related by a theme that is beautifully explained in a quote from the short that lent its title to the book: And that’s when Oren understood. Do we live in water? He watched the fish come to the end of its blue world, invisible and impassible, turn, go around and turn again as he sensed another wall and another and on and on. It didn’t even look like water in there, so clear and blue. And the goddamn fish just swam in its circles, as if he believed that, one of these times, the glass wouldn’t be there and he would just sail off, into the open.Every character here comes up against wall after wall, some of their own making and others erected through no fault of the character himself. Throughout, Walter’s writing style is pure gold. The dialogue is gritty and real, the characters always in some way relatable, and the tone brilliantly developed then supported. From introspective asides to heart-wrenching conversations, the author drags us into the pit of despair then kicks us out into the blinding light of reality with enough humor to lessen the glare.“Virgo” is my favorite story of this collection and was also released as a teaser story at the end of The Financial Lives of the Poets. A jilted man takes his revenge on an ex lover in a most deliciously wicked way. Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a Dear John exit will find this piece to be smugly satisfying. “We Live in Water” was also an incredible read. Spanning thirty years and alternating between past and present, this one brought me to tears. Another standout was “Don’t Eat Cats”, a seemingly metaphoric condemnation of millennials and the franchising of corporate America, and a public-service treatise on illicit drugs, told with a wit that bites to the bone. It was, however, “The Wolf and the Wild” that offered my favorite exchange of the set:“On the bright side, I have figured out how to fix the American educational system. End it at sixth grade.” “Brilliant. Then what?” “Lock them up in empty factories, give them all the Red Bull, condoms, and nachos they want, pipe in club music, and check back when they’re twenty-five. Anyone still alive, we send to grad school.” Wade pushed his glass forward. “How’s that for a campaign platform?”Seriously. Jess Walter is some kind of magic.

If you asked me to name my top three male, contemporary authors Jess Walter would top the list. We Live in Water is the third book written by Walter that I have read and, frankly, his previous novel, Beautiful Ruins, is the one that won me over. But We Live in Water shows just how masterful Walter's writing is and how adept he is at taking one single, pivotal moment and magnifying it in such great detail that it is impossible to not get the message he is trying to get across.In this series of short stories Walter examines the lives of people from the future and the past; he examines those without homes and those who want to escape their homes. Young and old are subject to the scrutiny and the only thing each of these stories has in common is that, much like a fish in a fish tank, it's placed before our wondering eyes and we pause for just a touch of time to watch the subjects swim in their lives before moving on to the next thing.My love for short stories is a fairly recent thing. I never could understand the fascination with reading a short story - having always loved my stories to be fully developed with world and characters. I thought that in order for my emotions to get wrapped up in a characters life it would require at least 300 pages of solid reading about that character. Oh, if only I'd been handed something like this book sooner. Some of these short stories are a mere two pages long, yet they pack the same punch (or more so) than books that are 300+ pages long.If you haven't experienced Jess Walter and want a sample of what this man is capable of then go to a bookstore and read just one of these short stories. I guarantee you will find yourself not only buying the book but looking at his previous work, just as I have done. In fact, I think I'm going to be reading Beautiful Ruins again very soon.

A collection of really good short stories. Highly enjoyable. Will definitely seek out more of Jess Walter's work.

Wonderful stories about, mostly, hard scrabble people. Reminiscent of Dennis Johnson. The collection is uneven in that some stories just don't fit. Also the title. BUT. Walters is a masterful storyteller. There is so much compassion for the most flawed among us in these stories. Highly recommend reading thus.

The world isn’t kind to the characters in Jess Walter’s collection of 13 short stories. Each of them is a loser, living in a “frontier of stale and unfulfilled dreams”: careless fathers, scam artists, ex-cons, gamblers, incestuous brothers, drug abusers.These aren’t people you’d want as your neighbors or your friends. They are, however, people you want to spend some hours with – and it’s all because of Jess Walter’s great skill as a words craftman and his incisive ability to create a wave of emotions with a few well-placed descriptions.The short-shorts – and there are a few in this collection – didn’t work for this reader half as well as some of the longer stories, which pack a wallop. A few of these stories are true stand-outs.Take the Wolf and the Wild, which begins this way: “They fanned out in the brown grass along Highway 2 like geese in a loose V, eight men in white coveralls and orange vests picking up trash.” One of these men, Wade, is in prison for white-collar theft; when he emerges, he is assigned to a pilot program tutoring elementary schoolers. One of the little ones, Drew, requests the same book every time until Wade brings along a sequel. The last five pages contain no words and these are the pages Drew likes the best. This poignant scene – a young boy snuggled into the lap of a stranger, feeling safe through the power of storytelling, is beautifully rendered.Another, Helpless Little Things, is a page-turning story of a scammer and drug dealer with a small network of teens whom he uses to solicit funds through fake Greenpeace offerings. But who is really the scammer and the helpless thing? This “turn-about is fair play” story is another winner.The lead-off story, Anything Helps, focusing on a panhandling dad named Bit who goes to great lengths to buy his son the latest Harry Potter book and the eponymous story We Live In Water – about an adult son who attempts to learn what happened to his down-and-out father – are also noteworthy. In the latter, Mr. Walter writes, “The fish just swam in its circles, as if he believed that, one of these times, the glass wouldn’t be there and he could just sail off, into the open.”No one can sail off, of course; most of these characters are, indeed, swimming in circles, no matter how hard these men strive for acceptance or redemption. And, for this reader, a couple of the stories didn’t work; Wheelbarrow Kings, for example, strives too hard for “attitude” and lost me along the way. A possibly personal story – Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington” may well be the factually-based key to a couple of the stories. This isn’t an upbeat collection – it’s not meant to be – but it does reconfirm Jess Walter’s abundant talents.