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Damage Control: Stories, by Amber Dermont
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"Dermont's short story collection, which follows her debut novel (The Starboard Sea, 2012), demonstrates the author's versatility and sardonic humor…Dermont delivers strong prose and intriguing characters who frequently defy stereotypical ideals…the overall effect is a tight collection that takes the reader in unexpected, often disconcerting, directions. Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort."–Kirkus Reviews
A luminous collection of short stories focusing on privilege and entitlement, from the bestselling author of The Starboard Sea
Damage Control displays Amber Dermont's remarkable gift for portraying characters at crossroads. In "Lyndon," a daughter visits presidential landmarks following the death of her father. In "Damage Control," a young man works at an etiquette school while his girlfriend is indicted for embezzlement. A widow rents herself to elderly women and vacations with them as a "professional grandchild" in "Stella at the Winter Palace." And in "The Language of Martyrs" a couple houses a mail order bride on behalf of the husband's Russian mother.
Dermont's stories have previously been published in many literary magazines and have also been featured in anthologies edited by Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers. Damage Control includes three previously unpublished pieces.
- Sales Rank: #803073 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-26
- Released on: 2013-03-26
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
A short story collection dwelling in the intersections of class, privilege, loss, and longing, Dermont’s Damage Control is infinitely readable and relatable. From the young girl determined to fulfill her father’s passion for presidential history by visiting important landmarks after his death, to the private trials of a young man who works at a southern etiquette school, the collection is packed with sympathetic protagonists in unsettling situations. Dermont has a talent for blending harshly realistic settings with fascinating narrators, and her eye for detail allows for immediate immersion in the story. The prose is terse and polished and should appeal to fans of Cristina Alger, Jennifer Close, and J. Courtney Sullivan. The stories “Lyndon,” “A Splendid Wife,” and “Afternoons in the Museum of Childhood” display Dermont’s narrative dexterity, while “Assembling the Troops” and “Notes toward an Anatomy of Pain” highlight the author’s commitment to different types of storytelling. The best-selling author has assembled an entirely gratifying collection full of both wit and humor but tempered by the harsh reality of ambition. --Stephanie Turza
Review
“Dermont...again impresses with her imaginative powers and cutting humor. Amid missed connections, unmet expectations, and things left unsaid, Dermont's gifted but damned narrators baldly articulate the pain and irony of finding themselves adrift in the seemingly beautiful worlds they inhabit. Dermont balances a proclivity for abstraction with a remarkable attention to detail, constructing a poetic tension between apathy and emotion that makes for an unsettling, provocative, and worthwhile read.” ―Elle
“[Dermont] seems to be able to throw down a convincing story set anywhere, spun from any premise. [She] is a deft writer, bullish on her characters, assertive in her descriptions of these specific worlds....As a guide to these stories we can simply rely on Dermont's desirous, tender driver of a narrator.” ―The New York Times
“[A] sparkling collection. Ms. Dermont's characters win us over with their stoic, even bemused, acceptance of disaster and abasement. In the collection's outstanding story, "Lyndon," a teenage girl loses her father in a freak accident ("My father died because our house was infested with ladybugs," is the irresistible opening line), discovers that her aristocratic mother has gotten pregnant six months into widowhood and comes down with an excruciating case of shingles, a malady usually confined to people "closing in on death." Her solution is a painfully funny road trip to the birthplace of Lyndon Johnson, a soulmate in fast-fallen fortunes. Despite that initial reflex toward mockery, Ms. Dermont succeeds in bringing out some of our finer feelings after all.” ―The Wall Street Jounal
“Dermont's short story collection demonstrates the author's versatility and sardonic humor...Dermont delivers strong prose and intriguing characters who frequently defy stereotypical ideals...the overall effect is a tight collection that takes the reader in unexpected, often disconcerting, directions. Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Damage Control is a jangly, defiant and often darkly funny story collection that questions authority, skewers education and high society, mines the messiness of family secrets, and plucks oddities from the real world to bolster the verging-on-surreal situations the stories describe. Dermont's collection is crisp, efficient, barbed.” ―Houston Chronicle
“With unflinching wit, Amber Dermont examines the harsh vicissitudes of life, and though the worlds she creates are often unsettling places, her sense of detail always makes for a pleasurable read. There is a vibrant lucidity to her language, a daring music.” ―Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize– and Orange Prize–winning author of Gilead and Home
About the Author
Amber Dermont received her MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held the prestigious Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among others. A graduate of Vassar College, she received her Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. She is also the author of The Starboard Sea and is currently the Charles Loridans Chair and associate professor of English and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Fourplay
By David R. Anderson
Amber Dermont's generous collection of stories, fourteen in all, showed up in the March 24 issue of the New York Times Book Review as worthy of note among a host of books "written by first or second time authors ... new to the scene..." I chose it among the others because because twelve of the stories are written in the first person. And so they are, several by sexually self-confident women, ages fourteen and up, who know, or quickly learn their way around.
Take "Afternoon in the Museum of Childhood" for example. Amanda, fifteen years old when she tells the story, sets the stage by telling us that, "More than nine months ago, I was abducted from our home in the desert. She escapes, her abductor, she calls him "Messiah", is arrested and imprisoned awaiting trial while Amanda's parents take her to Scotland -- they are related to Robert Louis Stevenson -- to recover from her traumatic experience. But was it? Her Mom wants to know, but Amanda isn't telling. But she wants her mother to understand That I was quiet, studious, and desperate to do wrong" before she was taken.
Genie, the twenty-six-year old narrator of "Sorry, You Are Not a Winner", sexually accomplished by the summer between her junior and senior years in high school, makes her living cleaning apartments for the nouveau riche. Mainly bachelors, but never professional women because they "feel guilty about hiring help, and in turn, compensate for their guilt with criticism." Matt, her "accidental fairy godfather" who has "set me up with my own roster of cleaning clients," is an off and on lover. When he learns that his date for a big party Genie is helping him prepare for can't make it, he asks Genie to step in. She does. And how, she is the runner-up in the Connect Four contest (see end note), defeating Matt's current lover in the process, and steals the show in other ways.
"Number One Tuna", told by a man required by circumstance to live with his college roommate's astounding and rapid climb to the near top in Hollywood, pivots on the useful insight provided at the outset: "Malcolm and I stayed in touch only because each of us was privately convinced that the other deserved to fail." It's a good line, a grabber, one that makes you want to read the story. It hit home because it took years for my first college roommate and me to get over the ideas we harbored about which one us held the better cards.
Sometimes you learn as much about an author by reading the acknowledgements as you do the thumbnail biography on the jacket flap. Dermont's list of those she feels indebted to includes, among many others, Dave Eggers, Antonya Nelson, James Alan McPherson, Andre Dubus III and (the late) Barry Hannah. Anyone who thinks writing stories comes easy would do well to consider how many mentors ago it was that Dermont wrote her first good story.
End note, Connect Four, the American version of the game of pas tempe (to pass the time) played by French brandy vintners as they waited out the tedious processes involved, can be played on-line against a computer. I tried, it's fun, it's free and it's hard going. I wonder if Dermont knew, and chose not to refer to it, by one of its other names, "fourplay." It would have suited the action.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Fresh, compelling, and entertaining stories by a really talented writer...
By Larry Hoffer
In the hands of a talented writer, short stories can have almost a transcendent quality, an ability to transport you into the minds of unique characters and memorable situations. I was a huge fan of Amber Dermont's debut novel, The Starboard Sea (in fact, it was one of my favorite books I read last year), so I was excited to read her new short story collection, Damage Control. And after reading the 14 stories in this collection, I was pleased to see that her writing ability continues to grow, and her career is definitely one I will continue to follow.
The characters in Dermont's stories don't follow one particular pattern--some are overly confident while some are unsure of themselves, some are lucky in love while some fight to find it. I really enjoyed nearly every story in this collection--some made me laugh, some made me think, some even made me slightly emotional, but each has remained in my mind, which I've often said is one of the hallmarks of a great writer.
Among my favorite stories were The Language of Martyrs, in which a woman tries to outsmart her boyfriend's mother but realizes that her motivations aren't quite what she imagined; Sorry, You Are Not a Winner, which told the story of a former rich girl forced to work as a maid while she cares for her ailing parents, but she never quite leaves her old mentality behind; Lyndon, in which a teenage girl and her mother take a trip to Lyndon Johnson's birthplace as a tribute to her late father; Afternoons in the Museum of Childhood, where a teenage girl who had been kidnapped by a man who called himself Messiah (a la Elizabeth Smart) deals with her life back home with her parents; and the title story, about a man who works at an etiquette school while his fiancée battles embezzlement charges and he battles scandals among the students.
A few of the stories were a little more experimental than I would have liked, but by and large, this is a tremendously entertaining and compelling collection. Dermont's voice is fresh and lively, and her stories are quite memorable. If you're a short story fan, this is a collection worth exploring. If you're not a fan of short stories, definitely pick up her novel The Starboard Sea. And remember--this author is one we'll be hearing about for a long time to come.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An assortment of pleasures
By Bookreporter
When asked to describe, in a 2012 interview, the "common thread" running through the 14 stories that comprise her first collection DAMAGE CONTROL, Amber Dermont replied that she is "interested in difficult situations people find themselves in and how they navigate them." That's an apt summary of the varied array of problems and challenges facing the characters in this robust, consistently original collection, one that reveals Dermont as a writer who is drawing on a deep well of talent first apparent in her widely-praised debut novel, THE STARBOARD SEA.
Many of the protagonists of Dermont's stories are teenagers or young women barely in their 20s. That's understandable because, as she acknowledged in the same 2012 interview, she's "really fascinated by teenagers and by the period of adolescence, because it's when you define yourself." Stories like "Lyndon," "Sorry, You are Not a Winner," "Notes Toward an Anatomy of Pain" and "The Master of Novices," among others, feature young women struggling to cope with actual or threatened loss. And yet there is such enormous variety in these stories there's no danger of the collection taking on a monochromatic cast.
Despite Dermont's preoccupation with young women, death is a persistent presence in these stories. Elise, the protagonist of the opening story, "Lyndon," is on a trip with her mother to the birthplace of the 36th president, continuing a pastime she had pursued with her late father. In "The Language of Martyrs," the narrator's parents survive several brushes with death from terrorist attacks on a trip to Israel and then both die of a "mortal tear in the heart muscle" on the flight home. Eugenia, who doubles as a cleaning woman and occasional lover of her boss, Matt, must attend to a father afflicted with a brain tumor and a mother dying of alcoholism in "Sorry, You Are Not a Winner."
Among the many strong stories, there inevitably are standouts. The title story takes place in and around Houston's "Sis and Hasty Breedlove School of Southern Etiquette," where working-class teenage boys are recruited to help teach the social graces, "nothing less than the grammar of living," to their often sullen female contemporaries. Martin Foster, the 28-year-old man who runs the school, claims his "line of work is more dangerous than most people suspect." He's in a relationship with the Breedloves' daughter, who's facing criminal charges in a corporate financial scandal. That's only the first of the story's multiple complications.
For anyone who thinks even the best fiction can't compete with true stories of kidnap victims like Elizabeth Smart, "Afternoons in the Museum of Childhood" provides an emphatic rebuttal. Its 15-year-old narrator has accompanied her parents from Arizona to Edinburgh as part of the process of recovering from her capture by a man who calls himself "Messiah." Dermont masterfully portrays a young woman trying to sort out her complex feelings about her ordeal and the man responsible for it. "I miss my disappearance," she says. "I was never so important as when I was gone." Despite her psychologist-mother's efforts to convince her that she's the same girl she was before the kidnapping she recognizes that "something bad did happen, and I feel as though I'll spend the rest of my life searching for more bad things to come."
While it would be inaccurate to characterize Dermont as an experimental writer, in a couple of stories she does depart from more conventional structures. "Assembling the Troops," one man's story from the playground, "where you cultivate your future," to early middle age when he concludes "You kidded yourself that you were the man with a plan," is a second-person narrative assembled from single-paragraph fragments that feels reminiscent of a Lorrie Moore story. "A Splendid Wife" is a tongue-in-cheek crime story, recounting the effort of a detective who has lost his own wife to suicide to account for a series of disappearances of New Jersey women married to health care professionals who have a preference for Dodge Vipers.
Dermont has a striking talent for attention-grabbing first sentences: "My father died because our house was infested with ladybugs." ("Lyndon"). "Malcolm and I stayed in touch only because each of us was privately convinced that the other deserved to fail." ("Number One Tuna"). "The second wife vanished five days after the first wife, late on a Sunday morning." ("A Splendid Wife"). "When the baby fell out of the car, she bounced twice." ("The Order"). These openings aren't mere gimmicks, because she uses them so effectively to propel us into the story; what follows delivers on the promise of such aggressive beginnings.
DAMAGE CONTROL is an apt title for a collection that deals with a diverse group of characters trying to minimize the harm they've inflicted on themselves and that's been wreaked by others. It's the work of an enormously talented writer, one that offers an assortment of pleasures for anyone who appreciates smart short fiction.
- Harvey Freedenberg
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