When Paul Griner's debut collection of short stories, Follow Me (currently out of print), was published in 1996, some critics observed that, although talented, he was a "writer who may still be finding his way." The title story, a sexy and twisted peephole into the life of a New York City performance artist, caught the eye of the film producer Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, Wild Wild West), who quickly snapped up the rights. Not bad for a writer who hasn't found his way. Now, with the publication of his first novel, Collectors, there can be no doubt that Paul Griner has arrived. But don't bet on strolling into this book as if it were The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Although it is an ostensibly breezy 174-page love story following the trials and tribulations of a sexy young woman, there's a lot to be discovered below the surface. Dark, mysterious, complex, and subtle, Collectors is the kind of novel that keeps writing itself on your brain long after the last page has been turned.
Like many serious contemporary fiction writers, Griner teaches the craft of writing. Though currently living in Kentucky, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville, he's a born-and-bred Bostonian (where Collectors is set). In addition to acquiring multiple graduate degrees, Griner has also been a Fulbright Scholar in Portugal, where he translated contemporary Portuguese short stories into English. When not slaving away in academia, he has taken odd jobs as a carpenter, a painter, a tour guide, and a truck driver. "Almost all of my jobs after college were designed to give me enough time to write," Griner says, "either while doing them or through making money, which would then give me time off. Usually it worked, though occasionally it backfired. I injured my back on one job, working on a crew building a post-and-beam house in the middle of the country. Since I was injured in the first half hour and no one wanted to lose a day working, I spent the day lying on a piece of plywood, until the crew put me in the back of the truck and drove me home at the end of the day."
The protagonist of Collectors is Jean Dubonnet, an advertising-agency art director who has a keen ability to produce dangerously exclusive, albeit extremely successful, concepts. (For example: "Not for everybody...probably not even for you.") An awkward, Ally McBeal-ish type with an edgy sense of intelligence, Jean is single and rather friendless. On weekends she enjoys wandering through the flea markets down near the shore, trying not to look like the collector of antique pens -- Cloisonnés, Watermans, Mont Blancs -- that she is. "That was the cardinal rule of the market, not to display your interest, otherwise you spooked your prey."
"While I don't collect," Griner says, "I've always enjoyed the markets. I didn't do any research on the psychology of collecting, though I've been struck by recent readings about collectors, by how much they are motivated by things from their past." Jean's past is full of therapy, hospitalization, and random outbursts. As a child, she was very close with her cousin Claudia. But then Jean turned Claudia's home into a giant open-pit barbecue, and the girls were forbidden to see each other again.
At Claudia's wedding, the two are reunited for the first time in many years. It's there that Jean meets Steven Cain, a mysterious friend of Claudia's, who warms to Jean and offers to take her out for a sail on his boat. The sailing trip goes off without a hitch -- a little sun, lunch, wine, and gratuitous sex in the v-berth. But as Jean is stepping into her car to leave, Steven slams the door on her hand, crushing her fingers. An accident? Perhaps, but what kind of man would attend to his lover by hailing a cab and sending her off to the hospital alone? Afterward, Jean doesn't hear from Steven for a week, and yet she can't stop thinking about him. The next weekend at the flea market, exploring cigar boxes for underpriced pens, she bumps into Steven. It seems he's also a collector, a collector of various kinds of binoculars. Bobbing from table to table, Steven makes the ominous observation, "Death is always the draw. Collectors like nothing better." Against her better judgment, Jean finds herself gearing up for another cruise. But this time the seas are high. A squall is moving in. The question is, should she be afraid of Steven, knowing that his ex-wife and former fiancée disappeared at sea?
"I would like readers to like Jean," Griner says. "Though intelligent, and strong at work, she's also fragile. I see her as a mixture of hopeful and self-destructive urges." While the ending leaves many open-ended questions à la Salinger's story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", namely whether Jean lives or dies, Collectors asks readers: Are you always complicit in the outcome of your actions, or are you perhaps a pawn in the game of life? "I hope my book is entertaining on many levels," Griner says. "But most of all, I hope that when someone finishes reading it, he or she hasn't finished with the book. By that I mean I hope that readers are still debating many things. That's what I think the best fiction does."
—Nelson Taylor
''Collectors'' is a stylish thriller putting a contemporary spin on a plot
that has done yeoman service in the Victorian ''sensation novels'' of Wilkie
Collins and movies such as ''Gaslight'' (with Ingrid Bergman) or ''Suspicion''
(with Cary Grant). The basic scenario centers on a beautiful but vulnerable
woman who doesn't immediately recognize - as the audience does - that her
leading man is a rotter. Variations on this theme might treat him as a rotter
but portray a heroine who doesn't care, or else might clear him of villainy
altogether. Paul Griner, however, is more interested in the psychology of
obsession than in the conventions of the whodunit, and the result is eerily
sinister.
An advertising-agency art director named Jean Duprez attends the wedding of
her cousin Claudia. Clearly, Jean is not the most popular guest. Her aunt gives
her a glacial welcome, and her own responses to the pleasantries and come-ons of
the males at the party are decidedly insolent. The foreshadowing of the wedding
scenes suggests a mood of nasty psychic cannibalism between the sexes. ''He took
the cigar from his mouth, its end sodden and horribly mis-shapen, as if it was
something dredged from the bottom of the lake, and she felt like asking if he
knew he wasn't supposed to eat it.''
By way of contrast, Jean meets a handsome stranger to whom she is attracted.
Steven Cain invites her to go sailing on the boat he keeps moored in Marblehead
Harbor, and though she has no experience with boats, Jean accepts. Lest anyone
imagine that this is romantic genre fiction, one may consider the ads she is
churning out at the agency. These are rather like Benetton ads, where nothing is
directly stated but disquieting overtones are rampant. Moreover, there's the
business of the undertaker whose phone number is one digit away from Jean's; the
spot of blood on the bed; above all, Jean's passionate collecting of pens.
In Griner's novel, the collecting of pens has a neurotic sexual quality. Each
weekend Jean visits a mammoth flea market in, of all places, Marblehead, and
haggles for cloisonne and Mont Blanc pens with the vendors. These negotiations
resemble her relationship with Steven, in which indifference, lust, and
deception combine. The operative word to describe their behavior is
''bargaining.''
''Years before she'd heard that Arab traders, bargaining, watched your eyes,
and once your pupils narrowed they were certain you had reached the price you
were willing to pay and they would refuse to go any lower. Vendors throughout
the various fairs seemed aware of that folklore; they were always watching her
eyes.''
Not until midway through the narrative is it plain why Jean's aunt snubbed
her at Claudia's wedding. By then, the relations of Jean and Steven have assumed
the center of interest. Violence when it erupts is swift, shocking, and
unpredictable, for this is a story that emphasizes suspense. Its virtue is a
pacing that won't let go; its drawbacks are the questions a reader might ask
when the pace eases somewhat. Is Jean a masochist enmeshed in the dark games of
a man who seems indifferent to her? Does Steven's own obsession, collecting
binoculars, balance out Jean's pen fixation rather too neatly? Has the subplot,
which involves a fire, a genuine function in the story, or is it there for the
sake of motivation?
The North Shore, as Griner renders it, is a generalized setting. Fair enough,
save for the migrant pelicans appearing on Page 128. Jean flinches at the
passage of their shadows: ''`Pelicans,' she said, and counted them. Fifteen.''
Even if pelicans were blown off course by a storm, it is unlikely that 15 of
these tropical birds would pass sequentially over Marblehead Harbor. Griner's
editors must have been looking in the wrong direction.
— The Boston Globe
As a child, Jean Duprez collected scars while playing dangerous games with her cousin Claudia; as an adult and a sharp witted ad executive, she collects fountain pens. But when Steve Cain, a cold, eccentric collector, befriends Jean at Claudia's wedding she remebers her taste for recklessness, and the two quickly become involved in a menacing romance. This suspenseful novel is at once delicate and bizarre in it's portrait of obsession; Griener's spare prose never reveals why Steve and Jane behave the way they do, but his story, like any true curio, is surprisingly haunting.
The gloomiest love story since Sweeney Todd, in a first novel from the author of Follow Me (stories: 1996). Jean Dubonnet is the sort of middle-aged ice queen who you just know is going to fall for the wrong man someday. The art director of a Boston ad firm, Jean has learned through her work that the best way to make something alluring is to make it aloof, and her
"Paul Griner's Follow Me is one of the most vivid, distinctive collections I've read in years. His range of subject and technique is extraordinary: patient, complex explorations of family life, flinty fabliaux noirs, stories about doctors and artists and outlaws, all told with conviction and velocity and a sure sense of the form. Mr. Griner's book is a present joy, and a bright promise." --Tobias Wolff
"Paul Griner is a new American writer of great promise. The stories in Follow Me are pitched at a high level, skillfully executed and driven through with maximum velocity. Griner's characters are wonderful, and they continue to resonate in the reader's mind long after the collection has been read."
--Thom Jones
