Seven Oaks Magazine.

For those of you who, like me, know that good reviews are boring, and only bad reviews really sizzle with any sort of style and verve – sharpened and energized by heaps of cruelty and scorn – let met advise you to catch me on another day. Some other time, I’ll talk about the tragic overrating of Quentin Tarantino, or I’ll skewer some awful spoken word poetry (let’s see if that little piece of redundancy clears the editorial hurdle). There won’t be any cruel words or high-handed superiority this time – this time, I’m reviewing John Sayles’s new collection of short stories, Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Collected Short Stories (Nation Books, 2004), and if praise is dull, then prepare to be fast asleep halfway through this 850-word Nyquil.

For years, John Sayles has been a storyteller whose artwork has acknowledged the dignity and complexity of “everyday” people in both form and essence. In form, Sayles’s films have rejected the elitist diktat that holds that the movie-going public needs the constant flash and glamour of explosions and simple-minded plots to keep their ever-dwindling attentions. Sayles has mastered the pace of the ensemble character study, slowly unraveling the details of the social nuances and psychic crevices whose exposition make us increasingly familiar with the man’s compelling characters, and remind us that though there is only so much that we can learn about someone over the course of a two-hour film (or, by extension, in our lives on the bus or in line at the grocery store), we can be moved and touched and informed by their stories nonetheless. In essence, Sayles’s work dignifies everyday life by focusing on it, in its beauty as well as in its ugliness. He elevates the status of regular people by telling their stories so well.

Those who’ve accordingly thrilled to Sayles’s films – such as Sunshine State (2002), Lonestar (1996), City of Hope (1991), Matewan (1987), as well as many others – will no doubt love his upcoming collection of short stories for all the same reasons. The collection of ten stories published between 1980 and 2002 is an absolute treasure, accurately billed by its Canadian distributors as the return of the “legendary filmmaker and screenwriter to the medium he first gained national prominence in – the short story.”

Sayles once said in an interview that he hitchhiked all over America, and I remember thinking, when I read this, that this fact went a great deal towards explaining the writer’s knack for highlighting the ways in which a small peak into one moment in a person’s life can show just how many forces and experiences are milling underneath the surface of any given moment; to paraphrase the Four Tops, he hints at the depths which underlie still waters. This tendency towards sharp social analysis might be suited even better to the medium of the short story, almost by definition a sort of literature driven more by the shadows and implications of character than by strict plot lines.

In stories like “Keeping Time,” then, we can spend the whole length of the story inside the head of Mike, a drummer readying himself for a show as he finds himself drawn in by the story of an old janitor. The simultaneous joys and terrors of memory haunt an American midwife in “To the Light,” while the title story explores celebrity and masculinity, as well as the ambiguities that weigh down history as time distances remembrance from fact. The author’s expert inclusion of Spanish and French, as well as popular vernacular English, imbue the stories with a realism that makes them weightier with social realism.

A real treat for fans of Sayles’s films is the inclusion of “Casa De Los Babys,” the meditation on adoption, motherhood, Northern white privilege and Latin American poverty that became the 2003 film of the same name. After seeing that film, so close on the heels of Edie Falco and Angela Basset’s master-strokes in Sunshine State, one is struck by the care taken by a male writer to create dialogue for female characters that is alive and multi-layered, avoiding the invisibility offered up by so many male authors, or the attendant romantic idealism offered by well-meaning male feminists trying to lionize women that they still can’t write for. In fact, Sayles’s writing seems strongest when focused on female protagonists, as each of the very best pieces in the Dillinger collection (“The Halfway Diner,” “Peeling,” “To the Light” and “Casa de los Babys”) revolve around women’s stories.

In all, Dillinger in Hollywood makes even clearer a fact that ought to have been obvious for anyone paying serious attention to American film over the past twenty years: John Sayles is one of the best storytellers alive and working today. There’s nothing much more to say beyond that.