Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story begins when he moves to the Big Apple from Falls, North Carolina in 1980 to pursue a career as a bona fide starving artist. A true writer, Hartley experiences life only to later describe it to friends. He eroticizes New York and almost everything in it, and his humor is his best survival tactic. Hartley is a self-described happy person--"drunk on city life, glad for its free tickets and dollar pizza and standing room...
Above all, though, the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles and neon-lit campy details capture the novel's overarching irony. As humor is Hartley's means of survival, it is also his means of narration: "Just when I'd decided I had the soul of a drudge, just when it came clearest I was the muddy flower-peddler, not her aftermath-princess, just when I felt that Immortality would only know me as a helpmeet, just when I'd gained six pounds, Farce, as it will when your happy-quota shades off into urban gray, intervened: all pinks, oranges, reds...
...eloquent is Tobias Wolff's explication of his short story "Powder"--which centers on a father and son's attempts at making their way home for Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. The urgency of memory, the need to mediate all the past's heart-break and humor, infuses Wolff's story with dead-pan beauty. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver's classic "Popular Mechanics" (minus the bloody conclusion) in terms of its powerful brevity, "Powder" is the best work included in the anthology...
...sometimes mocked by campus humor magazines and occasionally belittled by the students it strives to serve...
Plays Well's generous burden is redundancy. Like Mims, Gurganus has a native connection to North Carolina and the windy school of Southern writing. But unlike many of its more portentous graduates, he grounds catastrophe with humor. A shopping bag full of sex toys splits open on a crowded subway. A whimsical riff describes heaven as a polymorphous playground where Emily Dickinson is one of the few chaste holdouts. Elsewhere too, Gurganus puts a lot of buck-and-wing into what his fictional half calls a "Comedy of this shuffle toward the crypt...