“Uncle Jim Called”
by David Rabe
from the July 8 & 15, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
David Rabe is not a name I know offhand, though a scan of his work shows that I have at least encountered him in film. It appears that the magazine’s efforts to publish work by names we might have forgotten over the past few decades is a real trend. Rabe has been working since the late 1960s, primarily as a playwright — winning the Tony Award for Best Play in 1972 for Sticks and Bones, and receiving a few more nominations over the years — though he has written some fiction and some screenplays.
Here is how “Uncle Jim Called” begins:
A week ago Thursday, my uncle Jim called. When I picked up the phone and said, “Hello,” he said, “Hello.” The voice was familiar and yet I didn’t recognize it. “Who is this?” I said.
“Jim,” he told me. “Uncle Jim.”
“What?” I was very surprised, because I thought Uncle Jim was dead. “Who is this?” I wanted to know. I really wanted to know.
“I just told you. Jim. I’m here with Hank. Is your mom home?”
“No,” I said. I thought Uncle Jim had been dead for years.
“Where is she?”
Now, the Hank he’d just referred to was probably his older brother, and my mom was their sister, Margie, and the thing of it was, the bewildering thing of it was that I thought they were all dead. “Is this some kind of joke?” I asked.
“We’re not laughing,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I was in the middle of something here.”
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“Well, cooking. Dinner.”
“What? Is it dinnertime?”
“Yes.”
“What are you cooking?”
“Stir-fry. You know, vegetables in a wok.”
“You never did have time for us, did you?”
That was a new voice, a different voice. “Hank?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
He was right. I did.
Two dead uncles calling during dinnertime presents an interesting premise. And check out all of the dialogue. As it turns out, Maggie, their sister, is dead too, so this is quite the sick joke, if Jim and Hank are joking.
I’m curious how this will continue. I found the opening section intriguing. I like the speed of the dialogue, and I like when Rabe slows it back down to allow Glenn to realize that he has no idea what’s going on.
Happy July — and please leave your comments below!
Interesting to see fiction from an older and established theatre-world institution like Rabe, best known for writing Tony-winner “Sticks and Bones,” as well as “Hurlyburly,” if only because of its film adaptation (great acting but kind of wordy and doesn’t work all that well as cinema). He also has a few novels and while I don’t want to dismiss anything I haven’t read, they haven’t received much critical acclaim.
Anyway, the play-y-ness is noticeable from the outset here. I liked the relatives’ dismissive tone regarding the effeminate name of Glenn (also poked fun at in the Breaking Bad universe – and potentially the Walking Dead one as well, for those who believe those two shows are connected). Rabe immediately sets up a world of contentious maleness evocative of not only his own work but that of Pinter and Mamet as well (particularly in the repetition of “Look”).
Rabe is a master of dialogue, theme, and tone, but not so much of prose. The clunky section here–
“I looked out the window, half expecting to see them prowling about in the October air. A mist, on the verge of freezing into snow, waved under stressful crosscurrents. I could see rows of lights defining buildings. It was a certain kind of heavy black night, blotting out the stars that I knew were up there, twinkling like the last of something.”
–is rather overwrought. There are a few other later paragraphs that are equally tin-eared and cluttered.
The transition of “That night, they were on television” is a little abrupt for fiction too. Reflections on days gone by, nostalgia, I wasn’t particularly pleased with where we were headed in that section there. Hisses and buzzes and static and fog and strangeness and gloom; the “forgetting” vs. keeping-the-past-alive-through-history-riff kept the story together, but it was also rather obvious. And the adjective stacking was uninspired (or lazy/badly edited). The moon needs to be “big AND pocked AND glaring”? (caps mine). It needs to be grudging AND annoyed AND “looking down without seeing, stranded somehow” AND puzzling AND incessant AND both constant AND full of “impenetrable, insolent obstinacy.” All that to attempt to describe a moon. Geez.
Or maybe that it’s just that I was never moved to care as much as Glenn does about where Jim, Hank, and Margie are in the world.
A PI as surrogate psychiatrist ain’t exactly new either.
I wanted more of the supporting characters, the people in the building, the Slavic doorman, the girl in the beret, the old
man that smells of urine.
Why is “family reunion” in quotes, what does this betray about the author’s lack of confidence in this form? A guy with an effete name leaves the Midwest, becomes an elitist New Yawker, is embarrassed by his hokey relatives? That’s not enough for a story. The history motif is somewhat earned – the subject of family history, the father, Matty, being a history teacher, a brooder like his son who moves to NYC, that son’s uncles, his mother’s brothers much more traditionally masculine, calling him gay implicitly but without saying it explicitly. History as being ghosts. He follows the ghosts to a theater. It feels semi-autobiographical. I was reminded of Russell Banks’s Affliction, which some people like but which I found tiresome both as book and film.
Italics for emphasis I’m not generally a fan of either. They need to call attention to something very specific (Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison do it well), but here they don’t.
All that said, the twist at the end redeems a lot of the complaining I’ve done to this part in the review. The story is certainly O. Henry land, and there’s a bit too much of a point or lesson (life is a series of choices, and a choice means killing your old self to become a new self, and you do that a few times and then you make the biggest change at the end of your life, when you die, and kill off your old self and become either some new self or just no-afterlife nothing) but it maybe makes you think or contemplate a bit. The names are all really good too. He knows how to name characters, an important skill.
So at the end I felt I’d been a bit hard on the piece, but as a story it’s just a little overloaded (yet simultaneously vague and nondescript). There’s a lack of clarity about what’s at stake. It’s well-conjured in parts, but it also feels like a draft more than a finished product. It needed some tailoring and focus. I get that Rabe is going for an intentionally blurry space, not quite memoir not quite plot-driven fiction, people who are not-quite-dead, a haziness, a liminality, it just is a tough vector (the short story form) via which to attempt to incarnate, to bring to life these fictional characters and events.
Even over a slow-paced 4th of July weekend, I resent that I wasted so much of my time reading this bizarre and worthless piece of crap.
Can someone tell me what exactly this story is about? Overall summary?
I thought the story somewhere was deliberately riffing on Symbols and Signs…The telephone call from the other side? The rain? The transport? I listened to Rabe read the story, on the podcast, and probably that is quite a different experience from reading it.
I agree with Sean H that aiming for that hazy liminality is a “tough vector” but I thought this story achieved that decently well.
Almost seems like it should have been published in 1970 though… “I was in the Battle of the Bulge”… the huhwhat? Now that I think about it, the story probably was written decades ago… a telephone? Who has one of those any more…He may as well have received a fax from Uncle Hank.
mkevane, it’s been a long time since I read “Symbols and Signs”, so that reference did not occur to me while reading this story. I have recently read Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and the odd phone call and then bringing in a private detective made me think of that. I liked the opening dialogue section, but found that the story did not really amount to much of significance after that. As for the date of the story, older references normally are an indication of when the story is set, irrespective of when it was written. As for the evidence of the setting, the Battle of the Bulge was 75 years ago, so for an uncle who has been dead for a while (and whose siblings are also all dead) it would not be strange for him to have been there. The fact that a phone is used tells us nothing. Most people (maybe all?) I know who are over 50 still have landlines. For Glenn to have one in 2019 would not be odd. The setting is established as quite recent when he later says “I went online and started searching for help”. Even if it were set in the 1970s, I’m not sure why that matters or why it would have made more sense to be published then.
David – Your points well taken… but you might concede just a touch? If Jonathan Lethem wrote a memoir style uncanny detective story with GMO animals as protagonists set in a kind of hard-boiled future wouldn’t that be a bit precious? And so is this, maybe? And that preciousness makes it OK to poke hopefully gentle fun at certain seeming incongruities, and the phone for me was a bit incongruous. Anyway, I’ll say again I enjoyed Rabe’s reading of the story very much…. reading it without his voice is an experience I might now never have. PS We also have a landline, and have not received a real phone call on it in years… maybe the dead need to use Whatsapp….
For the PI in serious fiction, Jonathan Lethem’s recent “Golden State” is superb.
For the character appearing in a fuzzy TV image, I prefer “Seeing Ershadi”, which, in retrospect, I consider one of the better NYer stories recently.
The dad who was in a dark place (“Well, I like to read about the Black Death.”) was droll, but didn’t do enough in the story.
For a much better semi-serious treatment of mysterious spooky phenomena, see “Killing Commendatore”, which I just finished reading. By the way, we had an excerpt from this novel about a year ago. That excerpt didn’t do the book any favors.
Overall, C-. Back to the proscenium for this author.
Agree with William about “Seeing Ershadi”! I really liked that story. Thank you for the recommendations.
I wonder if I’m just in a good mood recently, but I also liked this story much more than the others. At first, I admit I was kind of irritated because to just throw ghosts on the phone at the reader does seem a bit unearned, but soon I was sold as the melancholic nostalgia was moving to me–the fact that our dead relatives and their habits could easily seem ghostly to us–we know them so well, they’re almost there, yet they’ll never reappear. As I get older, I’m increasingly interested in remembering even minor figures in my life or fairly distant, often long-dead, family members and talking about them or thinking about them. As someone who is not religious, I kind of feel this is keeping these people alive. Something about his uncles calling like this kind of speaks to me.
What I meant is I liked it more than other readers of this site seem to have.
Ken, I’m much in agreement with your first post. I was very moved by the story and the ghostly remembrances of earlier days in the narrator’s family life. About a third of the way through, I had to stop reading for awhile because my experience of my own memories was so powerfully present, I felt overwhelmed.
I appreciate the complexity of the relationship that Glenn has with his uncles. He is annoyed by them, but at the same time is scared to see them disappear for forever. His regrets are pushing him into a deeper state of paranoia as he recalls all kinds of scenes from his younger years where he wishes he had cared more, but his teenager-like philosophy had pushed away the people he loved.
But at the same time, it seems like Jim and Hank may have been kind of bullies to Glenn and his father. So there is this nuanced relationship that I think we can all relate to. I though it was a very thoughtful and witty story. I don’t think I’ll actively seek out other works by the author based on this piece, but I really enjoyed having read it.