Well I've read and re-read "Pee on Water", the title story for this collection, and it continues to be a marvel. I reckon it's the most sheerly original short story I can recall reading, at least out of those that are also actually good (never mind great), and its rhythms have gotten stuck deep in my head. It's some kind of magic.
But in fact there are a whole bunch of strikingly odd, successful modes operating in Pee on Water, with many of the best slipping through time and space not just from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence, but in at least one case - in the outstanding "McGrady's Sweetheart", which is a war story and so much more - within a single sentence itself. The writing throughout feels a little wild and at the same time thoroughly controlled, with many of those satisfying little 'ah' moments emerging as Glaser's sidelong-experimental style opens up something new and true.
Cars come close to smashing. Flags paraded around, then stuck on the moon. A little sister orders her baseball collection by cuteness. Wild animals have no more room. Land gets so full of buildings, when town girls and city boys escape into the open, ‘God’ is waiting in the fields. Cars smash, glass in a crowd of shards. Huge ambivalent teen models lounge across highway billboards. Dust gathers between VCR remote buttons.So it was an impossible two prongs; I suspected "Pee on Water" must be a one-off (if for no other reason than how could she tell another history of the Earth, emphasis on humankind, in eight and a half pages or so?), yet at the same time I kind of hoped for more of something like the same, whatever that could possibly be. And, while reading it, I did feel something stir in my stomach - my brain? - when I encountered a story which used language in some similar way, especially "The Sad Girlfriend" and "My Boyfriend, but Tragic".
But in fact there are a whole bunch of strikingly odd, successful modes operating in Pee on Water, with many of the best slipping through time and space not just from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence, but in at least one case - in the outstanding "McGrady's Sweetheart", which is a war story and so much more - within a single sentence itself. The writing throughout feels a little wild and at the same time thoroughly controlled, with many of those satisfying little 'ah' moments emerging as Glaser's sidelong-experimental style opens up something new and true.
