"Sweet Nothing" by Richard Lange is a collection of short stories centred around folks in lower socio-economic/quasi-criminal circles, mostly set in California. The stories are powerful, relatable and brilliantly written. This was a joy to read and I hope that I can develop my writing skills to this level. Brilliant. ( )

I don't always have the time or the inclination to review the books that I've read. Sometimes it comes and goes by the time I get to adding my rating. I take the time to point this out as this will be my second review of a Richard Lange book. (And I almost chickened out of it.)

Having previously read Lange's novel Angel Baby and having left with the feeling that things were wrapped up a little too neatly I decided to see if I enjoyed his stories better. I could see from the novel that he was a good writer, but maybe hadn't quite cracked novel writing yet. Well, I think the assessment was probably pretty close to the truth.

Like any collection there was a variance in the quality and this was certainly a book of two halves. The first couple of stories are alright, but Baby Killer is very transparent plot-wise. The Wolf of Bordeaux unexpectedly transports us from modern day L.A. to 19th century France and it's hardly a pleasant shock.

The 100 to 1 Club is the first story that really took my interest and it perhaps made the others dull a little in its presence. It's an almost Bukowski-esque tale of a chronic gambler taking a woman on a first date to a race course. From there the quality seems to stay fairly consistent with stories about drug addicts and general douchiness.

Apocrypha is the story that is probably closest to a straight crime story. It tells the tale of an ex-con security guard who is unwittingly dragged into a heist on his work place. This was the type of story I expected going into this one, but Lange surpassed my expectations with a lot of the work on show.

There's another slight blip with After All, which feels like a poor relation to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's perhaps an easy comparison, but Lange's story just feels too vague and unfulfilling. Initially I thought the story was some sort of Wild West thing.

The highlight comes second from last with the title story, Sweet Nothing, imbued with everyday sadness and some amazing passages. A drug addict goes about reforming his life and the events of the story are heart breaking and inspiring in equal measure. It's subtle, but effecting.

By halfway I was at the point where I wouldn't read Lange again, but by the end I was ready for whatever he has for us next. ( )

Wear your darkest aviator shades. Richard Lange’s collection of short stories in Sweet Nothing Stories are set under the glare of the California sun, mostly in the concrete jungle of L.A. and surrounding areas.

There’s something about L.A. Must be the cognitive dissonance of smog and heat and the Pacific Ocean and the bullet-riddled ghetto and the golden hills. I went to school in NYC and yet nothing terrified me more than that summer I lived and worked in L.A. The neon-lit freeways, the traffic, the morass of cars and the specter of road rage. There’s something about L.A. I never liked the city on principle. The strip mall feel of it and the car culture have always been a little off-putting. The beautiful people, everywhere, heavily contoured and buffed. Too much lip liner and mascara and sculpted eyebrows and tight yoga pants. L.A. is harder and grittier in a way than New York City ever was. But I respected that. I grew up in SoCal, so L.A. was always orbiting my cultural imagination.

Sweet Nothings is a fantastic distillation of L.A. in all its cultural shorthand. Lange has a wonderful ear for L.A.’s special brand of urban vernacular, especially the thought patterns of its denizens—a motley cast of characters from an ex-con security guard and a recovering drug addict, to a grandmother who witnessed a drive-by shooting and a prison guard. The settings are mostly in L.A. but not all; there are a few stories scattered in the surrounding desert (“To Ashes”) or in a different time (“The Wolf of Bordeaux”).

Lange drew me in—drew me in hard—with this short story collection. There’s something daring about Lange’s unfussy portrayals, too. You won’t find gimmicks or tricks here, just real storytelling. Real writing. Lange sounds like he’s writing from the gutter, from the ground littered with bullet casings and cigarette butts; he writes like he’s been there. So many authors strain to be gritty in order to be edgy in their narrative style, to affect a certain tone and voice, but you can always see the fakery; the words and stories feel too cosseted, seem too much like a facade. Sweet Nothings is old-fashioned and honest, but not safe—it's far from safe. Lange writes with precision, and he writes with a tenderness for his characters but also with a fury, too, that feels authentic. There's a veracity there that feels almost Frontline.

In “Apocrypha,” Lange captures the raw feelings of invincibility and invisibility convincingly: “I go back and stand next to my chair. I cross my arms over my chest and stare up at the clock on the wall. In prison, there’s a way of being, of making yourself invisible while still holding down your place. I feel like I’m on the yard again or in line for chow. You walk out that gate, but you’re never free. What your time has taught you is a chain that hobbles you for the rest of your days.”

In the title story, Lange conveys the poignancy of a meaculpa epiphany and gets into the bones of the character’s regret and remorse:

“My wife? Okay, we married too young and hung on too long. We were casually cruel to each other, and torment became a game for us. But that’s nothing unusual. You see it on TV every day. I can’t blame the kids either, although when they came along I had to divide what love I had in me into smaller portions, and it sounds selfish, but you know who got shorted? Me. […]

“So what, then, spun me out, sent me sliding across the track and into the wall? Maybe I’m not meant to know. Maybe if all of us were suddenly able to peer into our hearts and see all the wildness there, the wanting, the fire and black smoke, we’d forget how to fake it, and the whole rotten world would jerk to a halt. There’s something to be said for the truth, sure, but the truth is, it’s lies that keep us going.”

“But he lived on, and so did I. Jesus fuck, it’s a mystery, all of it. Smoke a cigarette, change the channel, stare into space. Then go to sleep, go to work, and come home again, over and over and over, until all your questions are answered or you forget you ever wondered.”

In the “Ashes,” a character regards the sad aftermath of a brush fire and the death of migrants crossing the border: “The fire burned hot here. Not even the blackened bones of the trees are still standing. It’s as if a bomb exploded, leaving only scorched sand and bare rock. Brewer concentrates on this, the destruction, the smoke still billowing in the distance. He’ll not pause to lament the cruelty of man. Better to keep running with that as a given.”

Sweet Nothings is far from cookie-cutter crime pulp or hard-boiled noir. In many ways, it’s much more nuanced. Echoes of Raymond Carver abound here; it has the same quiet humanity. Stories like these about the urban underclass could devolve into cynical portraits meant to shock and disarm, but Lange steers his short stories with real, visceral empathy.

[Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest and candid review.] ( )