"The Frenzy" can be read online here.
"The Crack of Doom" was reprinted in Pronzini's collection Small Felonies 2, which can be had in print form from publishers Stark House for $7 a copy. (George Kelley reviewed the collection here.)
Two accounts of aging men, more sinning than sinned against, albeit one is more obliviously culpable than the other.
The recent Joyce Carol Oates story is the account of a late middle-aged man taking his still, if just barely, teen-aged mistress (he is careful to refer to her in his running interior monologue as very nearly 20yo) on a weekend getaway in Cape May, NJ. The somewhat older Malzberg/Pronzini story is an account of a man perhaps a few years older, trying to make sense of his predicament as he awaits his orders to commit mayhem in NYC from an amorphous but deadly conspiracy that has him under their collective thumb. Malzberg's ultraviolet sense of humor, as frequently in their collaborations, is only augmented by Pronzini's contribution.
Both men mistake themselves for essentially benevolent, even if potential agent of chaos Elias is less certain of this than is philanderer Cassidy.
Both have wives and children that they have grown somewhat estranged from, albeit their wives are still present in their lives and can be seen as trying to help both protagonists, however insufficiently from the point of view of both men. Oates's Cassidy first met his young mistress Brianna when she performed in the same high school Palestrina choral concert as Cassidy's daughter, who remains three years younger than his paramour. Brianna for her part is somewhat flighty and lost, floating through life haphazardly (as her affair might suggest), but still full of vigor that Cassidy draws on and enjoys controlling as best (or worst) he might.
Both stories are good examples of what their authors have been capable of. The collaboration cites the Rene Magritte painting that presumably served as partial inspiration; the Oates doesn't overplay the kind of smug self-justification its Cassidy wallows in, even as he feels a distant sense of shame for some, but by no means all, of his behavior.
I'd been meaning to read the Oates for a week or so, since it was released on-line...I'd misplaced the book I was going to review along with the New Yorker story, but the long-buried AHMM issue had just been disinterred, so it makes an interesting counterpoint in paranoia of a different flavor...as I'd put the issue away almost a decade ago before I had a chance to read it.
For more of today's short stories (and another take on the Oates!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
