The Garden State by Gary Krist

A decade ago, I had a plan for a reading project. I thought it would be fun to read as many of the Vintage Contemporaries as I could, roughly thirty years after they were published. If I could do one of them a month - and that seemed entirely plausible - I could "keep up" with them, and read my way forward through at least the first four or five years when it was a tight, specific series with a clear look and editorial focus.

I read four of them at the end of 2014 - monthly, as planned - and just four more in 2015, where unemployment and a job transition made the first big disruption. And then I tried to read A Fan's Notes, a book that still makes me shudder to this day.

Since then, that tag has had a few scattered entries - three in 2019, one the next year, and then Steps just a month ago. And now I have another, a month later. I'm not back to the old plan - not at all - but I do still have a shelf full of these books, and want to read them eventually. It won't be in publication order, and it won't be thirty (or now forty) years later. (Some of the fatter books, and the ones that remind me more strongly of Fan's Notes, might be much later or not at all.)

That's one reason why I ended up reading Gary Krist's 1988 debut short story collection The Garden State in the summer of 2024; it was a Vintage Contemporary paperback in November of 1989.

The other reason comes from the title - this is a collection of stories all set in New Jersey, by a New Jersey writer, written and published when I was in college (not far from New Jersey) and thought I might turn into a writer myself. It was one of a bunch of collections that came up in lists from various professors, of books that budding writers should look at, and it was in the back of my head for a long time, as I transitioned from a wannabe-writer to an actual editor...and then out of that as well.

Garden State collects eight stories - two of which appeared elsewhere first, so maybe "collects" isn't quite the right word. They're all literary, all stories of relatively normal suburban people, in a modern, realistic world, with what you could call average lives and concerns - set in the milieu of northern New Jersey in the '80s, the era and place where I grew up.

I could run through the stories one by one, but I don't know if that's worth it - there's something terribly frog-boiling about detailing the plots of literary stories. Krist is a thoughtful but relatively straightforward writer, somewhat in the Raymond Carver mode here - these are about the emotions that don't get explained or spoken about, about the ways people connect with each other or fail to.

And I want to be clear that I could easily find these stories more emotionally resonant than the average reader just because they are set in my backyard, and about mostly youngish people during the time when I was young myself. (The first story, "Tribes of Northern New Jersey," is narrated by a highschool senior; there's another highschooler later, and even most of the adults are on the younger side.)

I like reading stories like this, at least every once in a while. They exercise different muscles for a reader than the plottier stories of genre fiction, force a reader to think about and look for different things in a story. And they tend, like Krist is here, to be well-written on a sentence and paragraph level, stories with prose that's enjoyable and supple and evocative - all things not to be assumed with genre.

I don't know if I'd highly recommend this specific book; it connects to me for a lot of extraliterary reasons. But I think every reader should read books like this semi-regularly if it's not part of their core reading diet, to remind them of what is possible and what else stories can do. And this one is a solid choice, especially if you do have any connection to New Jersey in the 80s.