Little Men

Little Men (2004) is a collection of short stories and two novellas by Gerald Shapiro. Each piece in this volume captures Shapiro's unique take on the world and the bizarre but all-too-human characters who inhabit it. Veering from the hilariously comic to the wrenchingly moving, often within the course of the same story, this collection brings together a diverse assortment of tales that celebrate the absurdity and profundity of life and love.

Little Men opens with the novella A Box of Ashes, introducing Ira Mittelman, a middle-aged San Francisco book restorer confronted with an unusual dilemma. His father has recently passed away, leaving a very specific request behind: scatter his ashes at Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp in Missouri where he spent his summers as a child. Now, Ira is torn over whether he should even honor his father's last wish. While Missouri is a long drive from California, the number of miles isn't the primary barrier preventing Ira from going. It's his ex-wife, Pauline. Despite the fact that the two are divorced, they continue to have sex, meeting up like clockwork every Friday night for a rendezvous. The relationship is important to Ira, even though his connection with Pauline is tenuous at best—outside of the bedroom, anyway. If he were to leave now for Missouri to spread his dad's ashes, Ira would be endangering his already-delicate relationship with Pauline.

As he mulls his options, Ira reflects on his life and childhood, specifically his experience in the Boy Scouts. It was a nightmare for a kid as sensitive and uninterested as he was, a kid whose own mother "was convinced that he was made of papier-mâché." Remembering his misadventures in the Scouts compels Ira to recall his best childhood friend, Larry Fontenot. As he reviews his younger life and self, Ira comes to a startling conclusion. "He's always been focused on something else, something coming up, rather than the moment at hand. He'd been in a fog throughout his childhood, it seemed to him now. He hadn't known a goddamn thing about the world."



Ira decides to head to Missouri. When he arrives, he reconnects with Larry. Larry lives with his bedridden, Evangelical Christian wife, Belinda, for whom he provides round-the-clock care. When Ira invites Larry and Belinda to come with him to scatter his father's ashes at Camp HaHaTonka, the ultra-religious Belinda says that Jesus has sent her a message; this message brings Box of Ashes to a close. "This trip will be your trial," she informs Ira. "[Jesus will] be driving every bit of the way."

Bookending Little Men is the novella Spivak in Babylon. Its antihero, thirty-year-old Leo Spivak, is a determined copywriter living in Chicago. When he is presented with the opportunity to go to Hollywood for the filming of one of his agency's commercials, he jumps at the chance. Excited to experience the business of showbiz, he stays at the famed Chateau Marmont. During his week in La La Land, however, Leo is lured into the seedy underbelly of the supposed Tinseltown—and the harsh realities that come with doing business there. By the time he returns home, Leo is disillusioned with life and work and hates himself.

The central characters in the short stories of Little Men are equally as hapless as Ira Mittelman and Leo Spivak. "Bernard, the Mummy" revolves around a fledgling adman. "Teeth" focuses on an upstart young teacher who gets some much-needed dental work performed. The only story to feature a female protagonist is "The Naming of Parts." In this tale, newlywed Joan attempts to overcome her aversion to people nicknaming their private parts. She has a very unorthodox way of surmounting this hang-up—she watches adult movies in which her new husband's boss allegedly stars, disguising himself in a Heinrich Himmler mask.



Each story collected in this volume centers on a struggling, unorthodox hero who journeys from one experience of the world at the beginning of the story to a different understanding of the world by the end. Along the way, the characters gather wisdom in situations that range from unexpected at best to downright odd at the most extreme. The result is both a tribute to the craziness of life and a scathing indictment of it.

Little Men was awarded The Ohio State University Short Fiction Prize. At the time of publication, Shapiro was an English professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Little Men was his third and final book, after the story collections From Hunger and Bad Jews and Other Stories. Shapiro died in 2011 at the age of sixty-one.