The Least You Need to Know
The Least You Need to Know
by Lee Martin
Sarabande Books, Inc,
175 pages
In his collection of stories, The Least You Need To Know, Lee Martin explores loss of innocence and the harsh truths of growing up and growing old. His characters are funny, tragic, often weak and heartbreakingly human. Most of the stories are set in the late fifties and early sixties, the era of the Civil Rights movement and embrace the turbulent feelings of the time.Five of the seven stories in the collection take on the theme of the adolescent boy coming of age and coming into conflict with his parents and their moral failings. Martin's teenage narrators find themselves caught between their parents, who each want different things from their sons. Although the themes are similar, each story provides a different take on what it means to grow up. Martin gives us adulthood as seen through the eyes of characters who are not quite there yet and who proceed toward manhood with trepidation.
The fathers in Martin's stories are charming, weak, vain men who work at objectionable, often disgusting jobs. In the title story "The Least You Need to Know," Perry, the narrator, tries to impress friends by telling them about his father's job cleaning up crime scenes. In other stories, one father is an undertaker, another works in a slaughterhouse, and still another sells goods to poor Blacks on credit, charging enormous interest.
The mothers are women bored with their marriages and lives, trying to hang onto youth by dressing in glamorous clothes, taking up strange hobbies and engaging in dangerous flirtations. In "The Welcome Table," set in Nashville during the Civil Rights era, a woman combats the decline of her looks and the deterioration of her world with "eggshell art," painting miniature scenes of perfect harmony inside the fragile shells. In "The End of Sorry," Joe's mother is about to embark on an affair with Lyle King, the county tax assessor, an Oldsmobile driving dandy drenched in Old Spice.
In the face of his parents' increasing ridiculousness and shame, each young man is asked to stand by them or do what is right, often with painful results. In "Light Opera," Perry must decide if he is going to support his father in a lie that will damage the reputation of another man. In "The Price is the Price," Mr. Salk paints swastikas on his own storefront and expects his son, Sam, to keep his secret for what he believes will be the greater good (which may just include fattening his own bank account).
The two remaining stories, "Small Facts," and "Secrets," seem to be a departure from the other stories. In "Small Facts," Fern App marries Glen Hobb for fear of remaining single for life, only to find that marriage is not what she hoped for and that there are fates worse than spinsterhood. In "Secrets," perhaps the most beautiful story in the collection, an elderly couple comes to terms with the fleetingness of time and mortality which will bring an end to their love built on a lifetime together. These stories fit the collection nicely because they are also about making choices and losing innocence, which Martin demonstrates, can sometimes prevail into old age.
Lee Martin's gentle prose style and his ability to turn his plot on a dime, combined with a sense of humor and an appreciation for the tragedy of being human, make The Least You Need To Know worthy of high praise and re-reading.
Review by Maryanne Hexberg
