Good Trouble: Stories

by Joseph O'Neill

Overview

From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Netherland comes a collection of stunning, subversive, wryly comic stories that reveal the emotional depths and surprising beauty of life in the twenty-first century. A poet confronts the state of his art when asked to sign a petition-in-verse to free Edward Snowden. A man attending a wedding in Tuscany seeks a moment of solace with a friendly goose. A father uses a tracking app to follow his son’s stolen phone, opening wider questions of the world and its dangers. In these flashes of trouble, O’Neill unearths the real, secretly political consequences of our ordinary lives. No writer is more incisive about the world we live in now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525436645
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.

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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Table of Contents

Contents
 
 
Pardon Edward Snowden 3
 
The Trusted Traveler 18
 
The World of Cheese 31
 
The Referees 53
 
Promises, Promises 66
 
The Death of Billy Joel 68
 
Ponchos 86
 
The Poltroon Husband 105
 
Goose 119
 
The Mustache in 2010 133
 
The Sinking of the Houston 145

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading/viewing list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill. It is a masterful collection of stories about the strange world we live in today.

1. What links the eleven stories to one another, other than their having been written by Joseph O’Neill? If you have read Netherland, how are these stories similar or not similar to that novel in terms of their themes?

2. How are the stories urban, even those that are set in more rural settings? How is New York City a character in most of the stories?

3. The stories are all set in the present day, in the early twenty-first century. How does the past seep into the stories? Or does it not?

4. Are the narrators’ voices in the stories similar throughout the collection? Why or why not? Describe the various perspectives.

5. Discuss the role of male friendship in the collection. How are the friendships primarily connected to sports, in particular golf, and to college days? Why?

6. Most of the narrators or the main characters of the stories are male, between the ages of thirty and fifty. How does this influence the stories? What are the preoccupations of the characters? How are they similar to one another? Or not?

7. Discuss the story with a mother as the main character, “The World of Cheese.” What do you think of the ending of that story? Do you sympathize with Breda?

8. In terms of the women characters in the collection overall, how much power do they have? How do you feel about a male author writing from a female point of view?

9. Is the order of the stories important? Do you think you would have a different experience reading them in another order? Why or why not? Do the stories influence or play off one another?

10. What is a poet? What is resistance? Are these questions easily answered? What is the poet Mark McCain in the first story, “Pardon Edward Snowden,” resisting? How did you feel about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature?

11. Discuss humor throughout the collection.

12. The title of the collection, Good Trouble, comes from “The Poltroon Husband,” where the husband talks about protesting and quotes Congressman John Lewis. Lewis said, “You have a moral obligation, a mission, and a mandate, to speak up, speak out, and get in good trouble. You can do it. You must do it. Not just for yourselves but for generations yet unborn.” Discuss this quote. How does “good trouble” connect to this story and to the collection as a whole?

13. Is the husband in “Poltroon Husband” a coward? Why or why not?

14. “The question of how to act is something that is keeping many of us awake at night.” Joseph O’Neill said this in a Q&A with The New Yorker magazine. Discuss how this quote relates to the stories in this collection and also how this applies to your life. Are you questioning how to live in this day and age? Why or why not? Can you tie this into “good trouble”?

15. How and why is the narrator of “The Referees” totally ignorant of others’ views of him? Is it something about him? Or is it a fault of NYC life and real estate and how we interact with others in urban settings?

16. Why does Jack Bail stop coming to visit his old teacher in “The Trusted Traveler”? What is different about his final visit from his previous visits?

17. In “The Death of Billy Joel,” Tom, even though he is turning forty, “believes that there must be some common knowledge that has been withheld from him, some widely yet selectively disseminated confidence, some trick of living that he . . . has not yet grasped” (p. 76). Why does Tom feel this? Why is he jealous of other men?

18. Discuss the husband-wife relationships in the stories. Which story do you think has the healthiest marital relationship and why?

19. Why is Robert of “Goose” threatened, “menaced by light-flashing cars” (p. 119) speeding past him? What do the fast cars represent?

20. Robert is “conscious of the grass under his feet” (page 130). How does the natural world seep into these stories?

21. Discuss the theme of violence and forgiveness in “The Sinking of the Houston.” Why does the narrator change his mind about what he wants to do about his son’s mugger?

22. How does “The Mustache in 2010” poke fun at mores and lifestyles and facial hairstyles of life right now? What is the “social catastrophe and mortification” (p. 140) that occurs? Do you sympathize with Viv?

23. How alone we are!” (p.103) is a line from “Ponchos.” How does each of the stories touch on this loneliness to some extent?

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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)

Publishers Weekly

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews