'Ambulance' takes an entertaining look at the lives of unfortunate men
An Ambulance Is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, By Jonathan Wilson, Pantheon, 193 pp., $21
As the title suggests, Jonathan Wilson's new short-story collection is not exactly an inspiring account of men at their best.
No, don't expect many role models. This is a largely hapless and self-absorbed bunch struggling to live up to expectations -- or prove they're worthy of higher ones. Mostly they come up short.
In that sense, the men in Wilson's collection of musings resemble the real thing. One is caught between a girlfriend who wants children and a mother who disapproves of the girlfriend. Another has gulped down the wine he was sent to buy for his wife's women's group. Another has lost track of his stoner son on a trip to Jamaica.
Some of the men in ''An Ambulance Is on the Way" are trying to do better; some aren't. Some seem salvageable; others are clearly beyond hope. Their flaws are at times endearing, especially when their shortcomings feel the most familiar. (These stories will probably be most resonant for suburban, middle-age readers.)
But Wilson's intention here, it seems, is not to paint a full portrait of the modern man. Rather, he's crafted his stories as vignettes, entertaining if somewhat superficial. Wilson, the author of ''A Palestine Affair" and chair of the English department at Tufts, is out more for laughs here than for transcendence.
The collection's best is a story called ''Lothar and Inez." It chronicles the trans-Atlantic flight of Lothar Mermelstein, his wife, Inez, and a high school teacher named David who's seated next to them.
Lothar is a celebrated heart doctor and intellectual, Inez is beautiful, and David becomes enchanted with them both. When Lothar starts to have trouble breathing and turns a pale purple, David, a ''responsible twelfth-grade teacher," can't help but see it as an opportunity. ''Inwardly, and shamelessly, David could not help but entertain the most depraved fantasies," Wilson writes. The story is taut and funny in a way some of the others are not.
The rambling title story depicts a strange but probably typical suburban tableau: Tasteless neighbors are building an ugly addition, a family has lost its cat, the women of the neighborhood are crying about Princess Di, and some squirrels have eaten through the roof.
Amid all this, a plumber comes to fix the sink, and the narrator watches ''in a state of interested awkwardness, which is familiar to all who live in a world that they can govern briefly but never fix." The piece offers several laughs, but otherwise it's hard to say what it achieves.
In the story ''Mini-Joe," a man is waiting for the heart doctor in an examining room when he decides to pick up the phone and call an old girlfriend. She is, understandably, confused by the call. When he tells her he won't phone again, she tells him, no, please do. ''Of the lousy men that I've slept with over the years, you could be the first to die. If you don't pull through, maybe someone in your family can give me a buzz."
At times, you even feel pity for the sad sacks. ''I'm going to die," a man in the story ''Dead Ringers" says to his wife in the middle of the night, certain that the pain in his testicles has signaled the end. ''So's everyone else," his wife responds before turning her back to him.
Can Wilson's men blame themselves for their lots in life? Most probably can. Some, like William in ''Mother With Child," who's resisting his girlfriend's urge to have a baby, are more self-aware than others.
He tells us, ''The moment I speak, the room's warm air is filled with clanging bells, alarms, sighs . . . the righteous shrieks of my critics, who can't fail to note my Jewish self-hatred, my ego-driven refusal to accommodate simple desires, my jokes at the expense of the opposite sex, and -- rightly, it seems, as we fall on the bed -- it doesn't matter what I say."
