Good Trouble: Stories

by Joseph O'Neill Narrated by Various

Overview

A masterly collection of eleven stories about the way we live now from the best-selling author of Netherland.

From bourgeois facial-hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, Joseph O'Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, underlying violence, and, sometimes, surprising beauty of ordi­nary life in the early twenty-first century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; two poets struggle over whether to participate in a “pardon Edward Snowden” verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a potential co-op renter in New York City can't find anyone to give him a character reference.
*
On the surface, these men and women may be in only mild trouble, but in these perfectly made, fiercely modern stories O'Neill reminds us of the real, secretly political consequences of our internal monologues. No writer is more incisive about the strange world we live in now; the laugh-out-loud vulnerability of his people is also fodder for tears.


Cast of Narrators:
"Pardon Edward Snowden" read by Robbie Daymond
"The Trusted Traveler" read by*Arthur Morey
"The World of Cheese" read by*Kimberly Farr
"The Referees" read by*Mike Chamberlain
"Promises, Promises" read by*Allyson Ryan
"The Death of Billy Joel" read by*Mark Deakins
"Ponchos" read by*Mark Bramhall*
"The Poltroon Husband" read by*John H. Meyer*
"Goose" read by*Mike Chamberlain
"The Mustache in 2010" read by*Cassandra Campbell*
"The Sinking of the Houston" read by*Danny Campbell

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/02/2018
In his first story collection, O’Neill (The Dog; Netherland) tackles the politics of friendship, facial hair, petitions, and spousal duties, with solid results. In “The Sinking of the Houston,” a father uses GPS tracking to hunt down his son’s stolen cell phone, only to be distracted in his pursuits by an elderly neighbor’s stories of the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Goose” sees a man hopscotch across Italy before attending his college friend’s second wedding. In “The Death of Billy Joel,” a quartet of golfing buddies head to Florida for a weekend of celebration, only to ultimately question the value of travel and escapism. O’Neill’s narratives frequently wander between ideas and end without definitive resolution. When this works, as in “The Mustache in 2010”—a tale of shaving, social history, and mindfulness—the reader is delightfully tossed about. Yet other stories, such as “The Trusted Traveler,” concerning a former student who visits his professor’s home once a year, never quite achieve deep resonance and sputter in their final acts. O’Neill’s writing is always inventive, and despite occasional missteps, the collection will please fans of quirky short fiction. (June)

From the Publisher

Funny and fierce. . . . An essential book, full of unexpected bursts of meaning and beauty.” —Ploughshares

“Wonderful. . . . Comforting. . . . What remains uniformly dazzling throughout is O’Neill’s remarkable dialogue.” —AM New York 

“Elegant, often challenging, and always entertaining.” —The Washington Times

“O’Neill writes with an urgent timeliness. . . . The thrill of seeing the here and now transmuted into morally serious and comically rich prose is heightened once you realize its rarity.” —Guernica

“Beautifully crafted. . . . Wonderful. . . . Gloriously Kafkaesque. . . . O’Neill’s tales often echo [David Foster] Wallace’s mixture of humor and profundity, demonstrating a similar, almost preternatural eye for the absurdities of contemporary life.” —Booklist 

“[A] fine collection . . . Compelling.” —Houston Chronicle

“[O’Neill’s] subversive humor finds new angles. . . . The angst of modern life pervades the daily lives of the characters.” —Time

“Poignant. . . . Fascinating. . . . The characters are subtly crafted, nuanced in their observations of others, and understated. . . . [O'Neill] quietly leads us toward a reflection of ourselves that, perhaps, makes us just a bit more appreciative of all the ‘good trouble’ we have.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sly and winningly offbeat. . . . Conventional masculinity needs shrewd anatomists like Joseph O’Neill more than ever before.” —The Observer (London)

“Elegant. . . . Remarkable. . . . Shot through with a subtle psychology and human attention. . . .  In Good Trouble, what is left unsaid and unanalysed returns, is unburied, and both its comic and quietly tragic potential is set loose.” —The Irish Times

“Mordantly funny. . . . Powerfully felt. . . . Examin[es] what makes us tick with humour, verve and sharp insight.” —The Herald (Scotland)

“Powerful. . . . Compelling. . . . O’Neill’s stories impeccably capture the minutiae of modern life and the interior struggles that are both molehills and mountains.” —Lincoln Journal-Star

 “A thoroughly enjoyable collection in which O’Neill treats his characters with a wry sympathy and a sense of fun. . . . There’s often a subversive, comic element in O’Neill’s writing. . . . He probes the frictions that make marriages and families fissure or fight for survival, the situations where discomfort breeds anxiety and resentment mushrooms into malaise.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“O’Neill’s writing is always inventive. . . . The reader is delightfully tossed about. . . . The collection will please fans of quirky short fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

“Absorbing. . . . In his typically sharp, smart language, [O’Neill] shows us characters undone by contemporary life, not grandly but in the small, essential ways that define our culture.” —Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-03-06
In 11 stories, the author of Netherland (2008) looks at crises, fads, and conundrums among the aging denizens of 21st-century New York.With six of these stories first appearing in either the New Yorker or Harper's, it's clear that O'Neill (The Dog, 2014, etc.) produces well-made, fairly mainstream short fiction. He probes the frictions that make marriages and families fissure or fight for survival, the situations where discomfort breeds anxiety and resentment mushrooms into malaise. A poet who's asked to sign a "poetician" for the pardon of Edward Snowden bemoans Bob Dylan's Nobel and in his chagrin seems to break out of his writer's block. The retired teachers in "The Trusted Traveler" accept the "strangely fictional few hours" when a former student joins them for dinner once a year, enduring this time a recitation of his troubles with a sperm bank. An awkward visit to a fertility clinic in "Ponchos" punctuates a man's ruminations as they swivel between a marriage strained by two years of trying to conceive and the buddy chat of three fellow stool perchers at a diner. There's often a subversive, comic element in O'Neill's writing. "The World of Cheese" centers on a rancorous dispute between a woman and her son over his child's circumcision, but the narrative also notes the father's new infatuation with cheese, including a "cheesing trip to Ireland." With a faux academic tone ("Social historians will record"), the narrator in "The Mustache in 2010" moves from a survey of facial hair to a man's peculiar shaving habits to recalling a contretemps seven years earlier between two people at a charity auction and then finds herself crying even as she tries to parse "the state of the upper-middle-class adventure" objectively: "I'm brushing tears from my eyes, it should be documented."A thoroughly enjoyable collection in which O'Neill treats his characters with a wry sympathy and a sense of fun.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171996062
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Sinking of the Houston
 
 
When I became a parent of young children I also became a purposeful and relentless opportunist of sleep. In fact sleep functioned as that period’s subtle denominator. I found myself capable of taking a nap just about any­where, even when standing in a subway car or riding an escalator. I wasn’t the only one. Out and about, I spot­ted drowsy or dozing people everywhere; and I realized that a kind of mechanized mass somnambulism is an essential component of modern life; and I gained a better understanding of the siesta and the snooze and the death wish.
 
Then my three boys grew big—grew from toddling alarmists into wayward urban doofuses neurologically unequipped to perceive the risks incidental to their teen­age lives. Several nights a week I lie awake in bed until the front door has sighed shut behind every last one of them. Even then, even once they’re all safely home, there are disquieting goings-on. Objects are put in motion, to frightening sonic effect. A creaking cupboard hinge is an SOS. A spoon in a cereal bowl is a tocsin.
 
The key point is that I no longer have the ability to nap at will—to recover, in nickels of unconsciousness, a lost hypnotic legacy. A round-the-clock jitteriness prevails.
 
As a consequence, the concept of peace and quiet has assumed an italicized personal importance. Who can say, of course, what “peace and quiet” means? It certainly doesn’t denote the experience produced by being by one­self. I can offer only a subjective definition: the state of affairs in which (1) one finds oneself at home; (2) there are people around whom one wants to have around, not least because it means that one doesn’t have to worry about where else they might be; (3) one sits in one’s arm­chair; and (4) the people around leave one alone.
 
The phenomenon of the Dad Chair needs no inves­tigation here. I’ll just state that there came a moment when the whole business of taking care of the guys—of their need to be woken up, clothed, fed, transported, coached, cleaned, bedded down, constantly kept safe and constantly captained—altered me. The alteration made me identify with the shipman, working in high and howling winds in the Bay of Biscay, who dreams of the bathtubs of La Rochelle. This led me to buy a black leatherette armchair and to designate it as my haven. I’ve got to say, it has worked out pretty well.
 
But of late, the fifteen-year-old, the middle son, has taken to disturbing me. I’ll be sitting there, doing stuff on my laptop, when he’ll approach and pull off my noise-canceling headphones.
 
“What is it?” I ask him.
 
“Have you heard of the Duvaliers?”
 
“What?”
 
“The Duvaliers. The dictators of Haiti.”
 
“What about them?”
 
“There’s two Duvaliers,” he says. “There’s the father and there’s the son. Do you know that they used rape to punish their political opponents?”
 
“What?”
 
He says, “They—”
 
“I don’t want to hear about it. I know all about the Duvaliers. They were horrible. I know all about it.”
 
“But, Dad, I’ll bet you don’t know. There was one time—”
 
“Stop harassing me!” I shout. “Stop bothering me with this stuff! Leave me alone! I lived through it! I don’t want to discuss it!”
 
He answers, in his mild way, “You didn’t exactly live through it. You just heard about it.”
 
I understand that my son is trying to get a precise sense of the world he is about to enter—the wide world. I understand that this can be a difficult process. I under­stand that it’s a good thing that he comes to me with these questions, which do him nothing but credit, and that these are golden moments that must be savored. I understand all that.
 
Note that my fifteen-year-old is a distinct case but not a special one. His two brothers are the same. Each, in his own way, threatens the peace and the quiet.
 
“Where is East Timor?” this particular son asks.
 
“Look it up,” I say.
 
His voice has arrived from his bedroom, where he’s lying in his bunk bed, in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and skateboarding socks, reading his phone. Sometimes he’ll come out of the bedroom and sit on the arm of my armchair and cast an eye over my screen while he talks. Which is exasperating. What I do online is my business.
 
He calls out, “Do you know who Charles Taylor is?”
 
I’m not answering that.
 
He comes out of the brothers’ room, which is what we call the space in which the three boys are cooped up. “He was a guerilla leader. In Liberia. He had an army made up of children.”
 
“Stop right there,” I say.
 
My son stops where he is, because he thinks I’m tell­ing him that he should stop advancing toward me. From a distance of about three yards he says, “He made the children do some really bad things. Really, really bad things. He made them shoot their own parents. I think Taylor may have been the worst of them all.”
 
I remove my reading glasses and look him in the eye. “C’est la vie,” I tell him.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Good Trouble"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Joseph O'Neill.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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