Blasphemies and Bloviation

Carlson writes best when he's least in a hurry, and "Siren Song at the Stanley" is where this collection earns its breath. The prose has a genuine ear for cadence — the clarinet that "sliced through the theater, shushing the raucous clamor of the crowd," the music that becomes "a roller coaster ride through the crystal corridors of some exotic paradise." That's not decoration; it's doing the actual work of conveying why a sound can rearrange a life. The essayistic first sections ("Blasphemies," the ironic pope-and-atheists diatribe) show a writer comfortable with the polemical sentence, but it's in the fiction — particularly "Somebody Died" and the Cyrus story — that his rhythm settles into something more controlled, and the satire earns its sting rather than just asserting it.

The standout achievement is the closing sequence, where Cyrus's dying dance down a dissolving Liberty Avenue toward Bette Davis and green-eyed Hazel Bingham lands an actual emotional note after pages of curmudgeonly bluster about rock and roll. The line "a man who has cast loose his anchor in the present is suddenly released from the shallows and miseries of reality to sail freely on the winds of his imagination across the emerald seas of memory" is overwrought but sincere, and it pays off when Lydia-Joyce, still dreaming, understands "that this really had not been just a dream." The dead politician's descent into denial — literalized as walking into a closet and refusing the mirror — is a sharp, cruel little parable that trusts the reader to supply the moral without a closing sermon. Carlson doesn't always leave a beat unspoken (he often circles back to underline his own irony), but when he does, as in Somebody's closet, it lands.