Sam the Cat: and Other Stories
Matthew Klam
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0679457453
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"I love being in love. I'm so in love, I'm so in love. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm in love with. I'm in love with the love drug. You walk into a supermarket or a restaurant, your girlfriend goes in first and you're looking at her ass. And you say to yourself, 'Isn't that the most beautiful ass? That's mine. It's beautiful.' Like it's going to save you. An ass isn't going to save you. What's it going to do? Hide you from the police? Call up your boss when you don't feel well?"
Like a performance artist in print, Matthew Klam stands up here and delivers hilarious, shocking, high-energy riffs on the theme of modern love and all its complexities. One by one, these stories amuse, enlighten, and entertain. As a group, they mark the full emergence of one of America's foremost young literary talents.
In the immediately engrossing title story, Samuel Beardson falls in love with a young woman across a crowded room who, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a bird-boned, longhaired, slim fellow named John Drake. In a single moment, "Sam the Cat" enters a sexual twilight zone, and a young man's cocksure, womanizing lifestyle unravels: "There I am, horned out and at the same time queasy with the weirdness of it."
In "The Royal Palms," Klam's overworked, newly monied hero walks out of a Caribbean resort casino with a pile of cash stuffed into his T-shirt. Beside him stands his wife, Diane, furious at herself for the cellulite that's recently appeared on her thighs. Their marriage is at a sexual standstill. Then the sound of an old jeep spooks them, and the next moment they are running for their lives.
Having fallen in love with his girlfriend Phylida's beautiful behind, the narrator of "Issues I Dealt With in Therapy" has flown to a Nantucket-like island with her for a wedding. He's been asked to toast the groom, once a well-intentioned civil rights lawyer who's grown into a sweating "Gore-guy," a self-absorbed power pol, a hot, young, curry-barfing bulimic on his way to the White House. Phylida, meanwhile, is a sleepless, hypochondriacal medical resident. Among this cast of frank and foolish characters, we're left to wonder if we have any control over whom we love.
Matthew Klam is an O. Henry Award winner, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and his generation's most on-key singer of the boy-girl blues. The stories in Sam the Cat crackle with humor, intelligence, and style and add up to an outrageous, entirely original, and unforgettable debut.
"I loved Sam the Cat. What a great collection. The stories are brilliantly constructed. They make me laugh. Très slanky."
--Alice Elliott Dark
stuffed dogs, wooden dogs, paintings of dogs. He’s even got a dalmatian-covered sofa. It must not be real. Or maybe it is—who knows?” Dave looked at me. I shrugged. He went on. “They have this lamp, and the base of the lamp is a dog pissing on a fire hydrant, and a boy squatting next to it.” I laughed. He said, “I hate working for these guys.” Denise kissed the back of Dave’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. He said, “You know what I do? My secret for success with them? I throw away my intelligent
White-painted wicker chairs with cushions, a table warped by weather, suspended on three legs. Two guys stood on the balcony next to ours, doing what we were doing, feeling the air. They were Italians, friends of Bob and Niloo’s, also just arrived. Both guys were tan, had facial hair, wore mirrored lenses. They’d changed into swimming stuff and were ready to go down to the beach. They looked like a couple. One guy wore a very fine loosely woven shiny multicolor sweater in the zillion-degree sun.
at the base—the outline of her lips was white—and tried blowing me. I could feel myself spiraling away from sex toward all my fears and anxieties. I tried to “get metaphysical” with my fears, to keep with my psychologist’s urging (she, of the fluffy, Native American “dream catcher” on her gray office wall) so they didn’t overtake me. I looked down at Phylida, beautifully pumping away, and the face of Steven Spielberg floated into my mind, expressionless, bearded, dumbfounded. I thought of how
shame.” More hilarity, a monsoon. “But if you’re going to live your life together”—I started doing a bad televangelist Southern idiot—“you must never stand directly in front of him after he has eaten a large meal. It’s very dangerous. And do not worry your pretty self about his latest diet, O.K.?” I made a puking, retching motion. “Don’t be surprised if he sticks his finger down his throat and throws up all over your car.” I took a breath and pointed at him. “I don’t know if anybody told you,
in Cravat. He’d had a small piece of his throat and some of the tissue in his sinuses removed, along with a part of his upper lip—not much—and the scar that ran from his right nostril down to his collarbone had healed months earlier, but still, sometimes, he felt it impeded his speech so that he wasn’t being clearly understood. He spoke to a mustached teenage boy behind the case with the face of a cartoon baby; the boy winced sullenly. As Emile repeated himself, two young women asked for the very