Trying to get people to read Happy Trails to You
is a little like trying to get Americans to buy bottled water before 1983. You want me to PAY for a book of seven short stories narrated by a nameless, neurotic Nantucket vegan in which nothing happens? Serious? Yes. Among Julie Hecht's ardent fans are Alice Munro, Ian Frazier, Michiko Kakutani, and Roz Chast. Who else could write a 22 page story in which the main action is a sober Jewish woman going next door to a neighbor's drunken Christmas party and eating one bite of a baked potato? The story first appeared in The New Yorker and the magazine does a fair job of quashing what's special into this forced summary:
"The unnamed narrator, a strict vegan in her early forties whose father
has died, visits her elderly neighbor on Christmas Day and is teased by
the family for her vegetarianism. When she returns a few days later,
the narrator tastes a buttered baked potato and finds herself longing
to be part of a big happy family. She regrets not having found
solutions to the problems of her father’s old age. When the neighbor’s
family passes around drinks, the narrator reminds herself to bring her
own water, because the plastic in bottles can seep into water, and ice
is often contaminated by bacteria. The only other beverage choice is
high-sodium V8. “I have a joke for vegetarians,” a red-faced man says.
“If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of
meat?” To hell with them, as the narrator’s father liked to say about
many things and people. But she’s not going over there, into the
forbidden territory of wishing her father and mother were alive. As she
gets up to go, a daughter-in-law offers her a piece of cake, “even
though you won’t eat it.” “Her husband can eat the cake,” the neighbor
says, adding that the narrator’s cranberry bread looks dry. “We put all
those bad things in to keep it nice and moist,” the daughter-in-law
says. “It’s the oldness of the oven,” the narrator says. “It’s the
husband’s fault,” someone says. “He needs more ginkgo!” the red-faced
man shouts. “More ginkgo for everyone,” someone says. “And less
drinko,” the narrator says. A few days later, the narrator visits her
neighbor with a better loaf of cranberry bread. The neighbor’s book
case is full of photos, all of good-looking people having fun. “Why
aren’t I part of a big happy family? I once heard a psychologist say,
‘Everyone wants to be part of a big happy family. At Christmastime, the
feeling is more extreme.’” The neighbor, who is not supposed to have
butter, scoffs at the narrator’s suggestion of putting olive oil on her
baked potato. “At my age, I can do what I want,” she says and offers
the narrator some. It’s the best potato the narrator has ever tasted.
She has to resist the urge to grab it and gobble it down, butter and
all. While the neighbor carves off some ham, the narrator thinks about
arriving late for a visit and finding her father eating a spartan
dinner alone. That would have been the right time to get him to move
next to the narrator. But her father had said, “Let’s wait and see how
I age.” But by the time you see, the person can’t be moved. The
narrator flashes a fake smile at her neighbor and says, “Bon Appetit!”
Even better is the title story in which she becomes phone friends with her polar opposite, a light-hearted, gay twenty-something boy from Texas raised by right-wing Christianists. He has atrocious nutrition, smokes, owns guns, and makes her laugh with his tales about his ex-boyfriend who made him come out to his rejecting family against his will then dumped him, or the time he hired disreputable locals to move a house for him, with disastrous results. He tries to convince her that every Rodgers and Hammerstein song name would make a perfect title for gay porn: A Wonderful Guy, I Can't Say No, We Kiss in a Shadow. She laughs, she ruminates on the passing of time, the loss of family. It's nothing, it's everything.
Here's a NYT critic on Hecht's previous collection, Do the Windows Open?
,
featuring the same narrator:
"Ms. Hecht is a brilliant comic writer. The stories are breathtakingly
funny, and over and over again I found myself laughing till I cried.
Yet the laughs are unforced and unmanufactured; Ms. Hecht's narrator
isn't a comedienne and she doesn't do shtick. Like other classic
deadpan talkers (Tristram Shandy, Huckleberry Finn, Thomas Bernhard's
narrators), she doesn't even seem to realize how funny she is. The tone
is seamless and magnetic and remarkably gentle, even delicate.
Moreover, the humor in the stories is so organic to the narrator's
rambling and digressive sensibility that it's hard to tell when it
becomes fused with sadness or stained with desolation. But suddenly
things change. A seemingly drifting series of anecdotes about the
narrator's acquaintance with two pixilated brothers who, like her, live
in East Hampton, summer in Nantucket and share her nostalgia for New
England inns with lovely Christmas ornaments becomes a pointed
lamentation for the inevitable loss of freshness and hope in marriage.
Entirely silent about love and sex, the stories bulge with excluded
middles and metaphysical heartaches."