Group Hug...Maybe Not

Owen King’s first novel(la), and its accompanying four short stories, provide a glimpse into a colorful, youthful, and (perhaps above all) liberal mind.

The titular novella itself, We’re All in This Together, concerns itself with a teenage boy, his grandfather, his divorcee mother, and her boyfriend. In the wake of the 2000 elections, George’s grandfather, a staunch democrat, erects a 15x15-foot billboard in his front yard: a diatribe against George Bush, complete with an ink portrait of Al Gore (one cannot help but wonder if it was intentional, and if so, why, that the protagonist shares the loathsome President’s first name). Before long, though, the sign begins to collect colorful expressions of dissention in blindingly pink paint. The young paperboy, having previously been accused of pilfering the Style and Travel sections from the New York Times, is the prime suspect. George, his grandfather, and his grandpa’s friend Gil embark on a paintball-, peanut-, and marijuana-filled mission for revenge.

Meanwhile, George’s mother, Emma, a worker at the local Planned Parenthood clinic, where she combats the local GFAs (short for God’s Favorite Assholes) on a daily basis, is dating Dr. Victor Lipscomb, and George is nursing a classic case of replacement anxiety. His mother’s old boyfriends he liked because they let him choose his level of emotional involvement. Victor’s fatherly ways, dorky and misguided but well-meant, catch George off-guard. This he isn’t pleased about.

The story is most compelling perhaps in George’s relationship to his elderly grandfather and his friend Gil, both of whom in their own ways force George to think about his own mortality. The ending is unexpected, but not necessarily bad; the quick paragraphs about what goes on far beyond the bounds of the tale that frequently conclude short stories often seem to me to be a way of writing the lazy man’s novel, i.e. the events sans the emotional trappings, but here they work better than usual.

Four short stories, all about 25 pages, round out the book. They are in no way related except in that they nearly all include drugs and liberal politics. Frozen Animals relates the story of a dentist visiting a patient far afield and having an experience that may or may not have been real; Wonders describes a player on Coney Island’s baseball team, and his sympathy for the “freaks” that make up the mid-game show—and some comparatively normal ones; Snake tells the tale of another young and similarly confused young man who meets a snake handler and suddenly learns to distinguish fact from fiction, and My Second Wife is about a man whose wife leaves him for the baker down the street, and some of the weirder things humanity is capable of.

I am not ordinarily a big fan of short stories; I want to know everything there is to know about a story, a subject, a person, real or fictional, and so they frustrate me, promising one delicious, sugary bite when I want the whole cake. As such, the novella was the highlight of the book for me, telling me (almost) all I wanted to know. It’s never enough.

The writing is far more than passable—obviously writing runs in King’s blood, as the son of Stephen—and the characters, while slightly repetitive, are fairly colorful and three-dimensional. For a collection of less-than-novel-length stories, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would; now I want to see what the younger of the King men can do with a full-length novel.