Roger Averill

In these wonderful stories, Richard Freadman explores what happens when factors beyond our control–mental illnesses, terminal diagnoses, ghosts of the Holocaust–remind us that our lives are not entirely of our own making. And, knowing this, asks what choices can make our lives meaningful. The stories in High Noon at Starbucks don’t provide simple answers to these questions but take us deep into their complexity. For example, in the story ‘Switzerland’, the middle-aged professional ethicist husband, James, has already tapped-out of his marriage to Penelope when he is diagnosed with a seemingly untreatable form of cancer. When Penelope asks him what he’s feeling about the diagnosis, James declares he feels nothing, which chimes with her experience of what he brings to their relationship. Penelope, though, is relieved to learn that he plans for them to take a train ride through the Swiss Alps. That is, until he reveals the journey’s final destination – an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich. So this is one way to deal with impending death: rush towards it and exercise our ultimate choice. Needless to say, the story is not that neat, and the vicissitudes of life prove more complicated in their randomness than James had planned for. This impressively varied volume includes a coming-of-age tale, the chaotic comedy of ‘Solly, My Sister’, the tortured entanglements and intertextuality of ‘Portrait of a Lady’, and the delightful campus anecdote of the Hong Kong-set, ‘Balderstone’s Salute’. Having sorely neglected those stories, let me draw your attention to the brilliant ‘Wasserman’s Dream’, wherein the eponymous financial planner, Gerald Wasserman, runs the gamut of the book’s various protagonists’ approaches to their impending deaths—humour, pathos, faith in science, rage—and then adds another: seeking insight from a religious tradition. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Wasserman’s anger upon learning of his fast approaching death merely amplifies his pre-existing rage against life. In an effort to educate himself about the surgical procedure that might buy him twelve more months, he subjects himself to a grueling online viewing of the operation in all its robotic precision and corporeal messiness. Still unsure whether to proceed with it, he questions his surgeon, asking him if he ever ‘sees black in his patients’ eyes? Do you yourself ever see black?’ Bewildered, the surgeon asks his patient what this blackness is. ‘It is death without God,’ Wasserman replies. Instead of doing what the surgeon suggests and visiting a rabbi, the non-believing Wasserman has a dream. As if falling into the strange, ‘God-luminous landscape’ of the Chagall print hanging in his office, his sleeping-self visits his Hassidic friend Kranstein and is then visited by his long-dead Uncle Moshe, who ultimately tells him that if you say Yes to life there is no need to worry about death. Waking from the dream, Wasserman remains staring at the Chagall print and comes to understand that, ‘The Hassid with his donkey would go on his devout, creaturely way, death-dread transfigured by stories of what it means to die’. What is true of the figure in Chagall’s painting is also true of Freadman’s wonderful story collection, except that here the death-dread is transfigured, not through stories of what it means to die, so much as ones about what it means to live in the bodily knowledge that we must die. And, like Chagall’s work, the heaviness of the subject matter of these stories is leavened by whimsy, tenderness, and wit. In short, High Noon at Starbucks is a funny, poignant and thought-provoking collection of stories.