Alan's latest effort, Something Shining in the Stream, is a return to form for the eclectic artist, and it proves beyond a doubt that he still has the capacity to surprise. Something Shining is a collection of short stories, except that it starts with a novella, "Pear-Shaped," which revolves around a Washington farmer named Frank Gustafson. For Gustafson, we are told, things have indeed gone pear-shaped. He is trying desperately to hold his family together in the face of various struggles—his son can't get his career on track, his daughter has just broken up with her boyfriend and moved back in, and his wife wants to spend more time in Seattle, where many of her friends live.
But as we eventually learn, Gustafson is hugely grateful that things have gone pear-shaped. Gustafson owns a pear orchard, and if the fruit on his trees hadn't gone pear-shaped he would be financially ruined. As it is, his excellent harvest enables him to support his children while renting a small apartment in Seattle where he and his wife can spend time when they want to be in the city.
It is this sort of unexpected and yet logical turnabout that makes Alan's fiction such a delight. Other stories in Something Shining describe a middle-aged woman who, we are told at the outset, has been taken to the cleaners by her financial adviser, a sarcastic country doctor who gets a taste of her own medicine, a love lorn student who is barking up the wrong tree, an archaeologist who can read the writing on the wall, a lawyer who puts on a dog and pony show for his clients, a studio musician who knows where his bread is buttered, and an elderly author who has lost his marbles and whose son is a few bricks shy of a load. In each case, Alan sets expectations at the beginning of the story and then dashes them by the end, and his ability to startle us with these plot twists is unparalleled on today's literary scene—to be honest, it sometimes feels as though no one else is even trying.
