Corey Mesler
Growing up in Memphis and knowing Steve Stern for most of my adult life, there has always been a temptation to tie my kite to his coattails. Because he is one of the best writers I know and because he is one of the finest people I know. And because his coattails, while ratty and stained with ichor, will only continue to rise like the rabbi from his short story, “The Tale of a Kite.”
You see, even back in the days which must be called our misspent youth—the sad, lonely, horny, rat-bastard days and nights spent in bars talking about Kafka and Jethro Tull and the women who hated us, we all knew that Steve was the best of us, the best writer to come out of Tennessee since Davy Crockett, or possibly the best writer ever. Though, in person, irreverent and never serious about anything, Steve was implacably intense (or intensely implacable) about his writing. And it showed. It showed in his early O. Henry Prize stories, in his early contract with Viking, and it shows on every damn page he’s ever written. Steve is incapable of writing a dull sentence. He really believes that every sentence in a novel should be a fractal of the whole, should be able to carry the theme of the entire work on its own slim back, and he’s talented enough, smart enough, inspired enough to make that happen. He builds those melodious, bricolage sentences with wit and spit and holy duende.
Steve took the mundane dirt of Memphis, Tennessee, and formed his own golem, a body of literary work that will last longer than red bricks. He has done for our city, and particularly its Pinch district (“a backwater Jewish community…whose misbegotten citizens refer to themselves as ‘the lost tribe’,” to quote a dust jacket flap), what Bellow has done for Chicago, or William Kennedy for Albany, New York. Picking a favorite book or story of Steve’s is like picking a favorite Dylan album. Someone will always remind you of what’s great about a different work. Still, I will boldly go out on a limb to heap particular praise on the novella, “The Annals of the Kabakoffs,” from A Plague of Dreamers, and the novel, The Angel of Forgetfulness.
Also, “Moishe the Just” from Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, in which some Memphis lads try to prove that the neighborhood junkman is a lamed vovnick, one of the planet’s holy thirty-six who exist so that God doesn’t destroy His handiwork. It’s pure Stern; it manages to be funny, disrespectful, transcendental, earthy and devout all at once.
One of the inspiring things about being Steve’s friend and, simultaneously, wanting to be a writer myself, is that Steve believes in books as powerful, tribal objects, talismans that transcend time, enrich the soul, scaffold history, draw a map toward the future, and keep you company when your woman is with another man. Books aren’t just entertainment—though he himself is one of the most entertaining writers going—but Objects of Gramarye and Faith. Favorite Steve Stern quote: “Sometimes, when I couldn’t afford to pay the utility bill at the end of the month, I was forced to read by the light of the stories themselves”(from The Angel of Forgetfulness).
In an essay, Steve wrote, “I believe that a story, if it’s truly kosher, should function as a kind of cosmic template, its language tracing a prototypical pattern the way a rubbing traces the relief on an ancient tomb. Then, thanks to the conjuring power of language, the story stirs the inanimate; the tomb sculpture rises up and walks abroad like a golem aspiring to humanity.”
Steve made me believe in literature that way, too, with that level of conviction. He made me a better writer, a better reader. But wait, friends: I would never compare my tinkertoy fiction to Steve’s achievements. I am here reminded of Nabokov saying, “My English is patball to [Joyce’s] championship game.”
Steve’s new novel, The Frozen Rabbi, is vintage Stern: funny, ribald, irreverent, wise, rich, deep, beautifully conceived and beautifully written, and exotic like a freshly discovered world. One more strong point concerning Steve’s oeuvre: he never disappoints.
Another way Steve is the writer’s writer, and after this I will cease the hagiography, is his generosity toward other scribblers, not just through his teaching, but he has also often found time to talk to fledgling writers and encourage them. He cares about Writing with a capital W, and, and here is a secret which I will now impart: Steve knows from whence Writing originally sprung. He traces it back through Kafka and Milton to the bog, to the Big Bang, and he carries that knowledge, gently, in his heart, a secret enchantment. As we say in Memphis, that’s powerful juju.
Lastly, Steve Stern, among peers and friends, is one of the most self-effacing, self-deprecating, self-immolating souls you’ll ever meet. He’ll tell you that he is a justly unappreciated author. This is, at least partly, a dodge, a jape. The truth is that he is a singular inspiration; he taught me that a real writer believes in his or her work. Steve believes in his work, believes it deserves the kind of intense attention from a reader that he put into its creation. What better lesson can one writer pass on to another?