... [an] expert collection ... Mr. Means’s pared-back stories attempt to distill memory to its essence so that it recaptures the sensation of immediacy. The best scenes possess a high-definition exactitude that makes them seem like flash photographs of the soul.
Means, like Proust or Woolf or Munro, is a time artist ... What I had first taken for dislike was in truth a sort of altitude sickness. Once acclimatized, I recognized that I was having an encounter with radical originality, and that understanding this work on its own complicated, rewarding terms would mean rethinking what a story could be ... Means extends the profound empathy of his attention to those who need it most, even if they deserve it least, which must be why he writes so often about adulterers, criminals and teenagers ... Like Flannery O’Connor, Means senses that beneath every act of violence there pulses a vein of grace ... his commitment to exploring its implications is the rock on which his writerly project is built ... Means’s recursive, iterative approach links individual stories to one another within a given book and connects each book to the rest ... this is Means’s most self-reflective and self-reflexive book to date ... both sweeping and narrow, panoramic and fragmentary, possessed ... What pleasure it gives us to gather them up, and to dream of a world made whole.
The implication is that a linear mode of telling would be insufficient, that such a telling would not only be banal but would risk missing the point. So, in a typical Means story, scrambling narrative time and shifting point of view—basic techniques for any writer—are elevated to higher principles ... A strange thing about Means’s fiction is the way it stimulates skepticism in the reader. I often found myself resisting the stories in Instructions for a Funeral ... Elaborate syntax leaves the end of a sentence, half a page or even a page distant from its start, in a state of queasy grammatical limbo that sends you back picking through stacked clauses (and nested parentheses) looking for verbs, marveling at how he got you from here to there, or shaking your head that he would even try ... The untidiness of his compulsive narrative layering has made him one of the most fascinating and confounding American fiction writers of the past few decades ... The best of them have a mythic quality, the kind achieved by rearranging elements worn to the point of cliché and making them strange once again ... his mastery of tone in each mode is the same.
...affirms his position as one the best story writers of his generation. His sinewy, digressive prose moves seamlessly in and out of dreams, memories, and anticipation, defying time and forming riveting meditations on longing and regret ... As in his previous work, Means’ protagonists have a lot to confess. But what might feel like rambling or ranting reveals an abundance of hope and heartache in the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.
Means’ forensic awareness working in tandem with a vernacular at once contemporary and folk ... 'El Morro' is a brilliant fever of a story, reminiscent of Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson ... With exquisite control and detail, Means pulls up from the moment of occurrence, and twists it, until you are seeing that moment from a vantage point decades into the future, or seeing its formation in decades past. The moment, in this collection, becomes the nucleus around which a life develops ... And the sentences! The rhythm of Means’ sentences, their qualifications and adjustments, moves so that the sentences themselves live and evolve in the moment ... in this collection are waves in this great ocean of human experience, and it’s rare that fiction reflects this experience of existence with such skill and sincerity.
... further secures [David Means's] position as a standout writer of short fiction ... the book’s prose takes you on a trek, one that demands complete attention from the reader, but repays that attention. Through his dense, carefully crafted sentences, Means transports us through time and place, interweaving action with his characters’ inner ruminations and flashbacks, and in the process touching on the most tender and enigmatic parts of existence ... gives voice to those who often remain voiceless, delivering portrayals of raw vulnerability and urgency that compel one to keep reading.
David Means is at home in a short story. Where other writers chafe against the form or distract with stylistic acrobatics, Means draws power from the single moment, and man’s infinite cerebral capacity ... The men in Means’ short stories are of varying stripes, but in each story, Means deftly builds a mechanism for their rumination. Means’ stories are mostly moments of potential; they ask us to grasp the effects of love and loss, to swallow dichotomies whole ... A Means story is a literary equivalent of zooming in to view a picture on your phone: a concentrated gesture that allows the eye to examine myriad details otherwise overlooked ... Means’ agile prose celebrates introspection above complications of plot, but the author builds tension out of pregnant moments ... Means’ stories are essential, yet each one had the potential to escape into the forgotten landscape of time, had it not been lassoed, harnessed in prose, and penned in by the page ... Means utilizes the short story to stop time, to reverse and expand it. Whether pausing to recall a homeless brother or untangle the fears and hopes of a stay-at-home dad, Means stories reveal the ability of narrative to communicate a story and to mess with our temporal identity ... Means’ narrators’ resistance to the tools of storytelling illuminates how we use narrative to make meaning out of our existence.
For Means, stories are not so much answers as they are extended investigations in which we try to make sense of what we want to know, even though our efforts must remain, essentially, incomplete ... What he is getting at is the conditionality of narrative, which in the end can’t help but fail to save us, even as it remains the only tool we’ve got. This is the paradox—bleak, but also with its own edge of connection—that animates the stories in Instructions for a Funeral. The tales they tell are incremental, doubling back on themselves ... This is what makes Instructions for a Funeral so vivid: Means’s deep recognition that all of us are facing a common set of concerns ... We all exist at a distance from one another, and even memory is unreliable and will desert us, which means that our connections will be tenuous, impossible to hold. How to write about such dislocation? How to exist within it? The conundrum is one to which he returns throughout the book.
Means has a practised gift for putting you in the head of his narrators. The title story, 'Instructions for a Funeral,' is a wonderful set-piece dramatic monologue that updates, for example, the last requests of Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb ... The crafted ironies of these stories often put you in mind of the modern American greats of the form, including Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff ... Means’s sentences, and his supple intelligence, prove a match for the task at hand.
Each significant event is taken out and examined, put back, taken out again, re-examined. Breath is blown on it and it is buffed by the flannel shirt-sleeve of a character’s second thoughts, restatements, memories from a later date. It is tested, as is the reader, whose own input is encouraged but second-guessed. Little that might be intuited is left to intuition. We’re not used to such discursiveness in the short story: it might sometimes seem to slow things down. But Means is good at judging when to stop, stand back and let the implications cascade. With help from a deeply sly sense of humour and the beautifully rendered landscapes that sometimes seem to be the only genuinely no-bullshit presences in the story, he always produces a burst of emotional colour, accompanied by a bittersweet warmth we can all recognise.
With subject matter as varied as the terrors of homelessness and mental illness and the demands of parenting, the 14 eclectic stories in Instructions for a Funeral, Means's fifth collection and first since 2010, admirably [fulfills the goal of writing a book warranting a second read] ... Instructions for a Funeral is like the proverbial box of chocolates. Not every story will suit every reader's taste, but there are ample treats here guaranteed to surprise and delight anyone.
... [Means's] long sentences and abrupt shifts in setting can be confusing ... it’s still possible to get lost in multi-clause sentences (one clocks in at 549 words). His maximalist prose style, however, has greater impact within the confines of the short form ... uses collapsing timeframes and figures from American mythology — FBI agents, gangsters, Depression-era Okies — to populate an imaginative world rooted in the familiar, while offering an alternative vision of America’s present and its past ... a short collection but it contains a considerable amount of life ... no matter what his characters suffer, Means believes in the power of stories to rescue and redeem people.
Means’ fifth collection cements his reputation as one of the finest, and most idiosyncratic, practitioners of short fiction in contemporary literature ... Stories, Means is saying, don’t happen to us so much as they grow out of us, which makes them connective in the deepest sense ... magnificent.
This superb new collection covers similar geographic, characterological, and thematic ground, yet finds Means at his most compassionate and mischievous ... stories contain told tales, creating an aura of oral history ... Means spins intricate, highly textured yarns with great artistry, care, and an acute, empathetic eye. Treasures abound.
