Chance The Cat by David Means, 2024
The magic trick:
Remarkable sections of economic, precision-sharp writing
Oh, what to make of this story?
It’s a Chicago story. I read it in Chicago. That was cool.
It’s also a cat story. I did not read it with a cat.
There are moments in this story so good as to make you think wow, I didn’t even know an author could have such depth and breadth of knowledge about the human condition to write such things. Seriously, it’s that good.
But there are other aspects of the story – the repetitive “what mattered” trope that starts each short section, the not altogether coherent themes of the police officer interactions, and, yes, definitely anything that has to do with the cat – that I found to be pretty cringeworthy.
It’s almost like an album whose lead single is among the best songs of the decade but backs it up with a bunch of filler, so inconsistent with the single’s quality as to be the product of an entirely different artist.
Anyhow, us being in the magic tricks business, I’ll return to the positives and try to single out one of those aforementioned highlights of transcendent writing. I love the way we get a crystal clear image of Kayla’s father in just a few tiny glimpses. Four or five sentences, really. Talk about economy of writing.
(I wish I enjoyed the rest of the story as much as those moments.)
And that’s quite a trick on Means’s part.
The selection:
What mattered was that when she saw one of the workers, pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks, she thought of her father in his hammock strung between two cottonwoods, one foot on the dusty ground, pushing, still dressed in his security-guard uniform, a white shirt and star-shaped badge, touching his mustache as he talked about the casino, a customer who misunderstood directions for how to get to Starbucks, came back around and berated him and then asked for directions again and went down the escalator only to return, minutes later, even redder in the face than before.
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