I literally laugh out loud whenever I read his stuff and New Teeth was no exception. I want to say, "Write faster!" But there's no question that he's worth waiting for.Īnother wonderfully weird set of comedic stories from Simon Rich. No matter what's going on in the world-and these days it's a lot-I always feel better after reading him. He makes me laugh like a loon and stands up fantastically to repeat readings. Rich's humor is absurdist and not even a little subtle. Despite these and others, there are actually plenty of stories dealing with the world of adults and, uh, giant anthropomorphized apes. The closing story "Everyday Parenting Tips" is another. The pacifier on the collection's cover is the first clue of one of the major themes. Opening story "Learning the Ropes" is another standout, and a must-read for National Talk Like a Pirate Day.
That dad is not the only one being ordered around by tiny girl children. I was laughing out loud in the back of an Uber. Perhaps most telling of his current circumstances is the story "Beauty and the Beast," in which a screenwriter is literally cursed by his small daughter to endlessly play Beauty and the Beast with her. Simon Rich has always been, and will hopefully always be, hilarious. And even if I didn't know this, after reading his latest story collection, I would certainly suspect it! I am aware that Simon Rich has had two daughters under the age of five sharing quarantine with him and his wife. Read one story, put the book aside and come back weeks later. Maybe I have answered my earlier question. As one contributor in a humor collection or magazine, Simon Rich is a star, but I just don’t want to make a whole meal of his offerings. The problem was reading so many variations on a theme. Any one of those stories would be a delight.
The narrator, whether it be Babe Ruth or a robot, describes a situation which he totally misunderstands while the reader laughs at the stupidity or naïveté of the narrator. Unfortunately, in this collection he seemed to be a one trick pony. Unfortunately, the story placed first in the collection, Learning the Ropes, was rather tiresome and would have lost me if I hadn’t already read The Big Nap.
This take off on the old pulp detective stories of the 40’s starred a toddler and his baby sister. So how would I judge New Teeth? I came to this collection after reading excerpts of one story, The Big Nap, in The New Yorker. Certainly the editor for a story collection requires a real talent for arranging the individual stories in the right order. You might say, when reading a novel, “Well, it got boring in the middle but then it picked up again.” With stories, each one gets its own rating, for good or ill.
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Then there is the question of how to evaluate the whole work when you felt the quality of the individual stories was uneven. If you go directly from one story to the next, are you doing the individual stories a disservice? It is a real compliment after reading a novel to say, “ I couldn’t put it down,” but maybe that is the wrong approach with a story collection. The reader has to decide how much to read at one sitting. Reading and critiquing story collections is different from reading longer works of fiction.
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