Last resort

Tod Goldberg

There’s something about a resort vacation that makes you appreciate home. For the characters living in the getaway destinations of Tod Goldberg’s latest collection, Other Resort Cities, leaving home is a desperate imperative. A Chicago hit man hides in Las Vegas, where 15 years later he’s a respected rabbi of a money-laundering temple. Trouble is, he wants out of all of it—the mafia, faux Judaism and especially Vegas. “Mitzvah” indeed. A cuckolded father abducts his children and ends up squatting in model homes, and another deserted husband converts his gated-community home into a Starbucks. Bad decisions come as naturally to Goldberg’s characters as his incisive wit is a natural part of his storytelling.

In “Will,” an exiled lone heir must face adulthood at middle age, and he is reminded of his sister’s exhortation to, “Stop fucking up. Stop being a fuckup.” This is the same advice Goldberg’s sister gave him when he was a young scofflaw.

“That moment colored my life from that point forward,” Goldberg says from his home outside L.A. “I think that’s what happens to my characters, where they realize, Oh my God, I’ve become the person I deplore.”

Goldberg might be the literary antithesis of a fuckup. He’s the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside; the author of the serial crime novels Burn Notice, based on the popular USA show; author of two acclaimed novels including Living Dead Girl, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; and has a second story collection due out this month. All that notwithstanding, Goldberg’s first novel, Fake Liar Cheat, was rejected 24 times, and his first published story was rejected 64 times.

“You’ve got to be able to say this life I’ve chosen to live is absolutely absurd,” Goldberg says. “The things I find most engaging are predicated on terrible human suffering.”

Readers familiar with his first collection, Simplify, which won Chicago-based Other Voices Books’ inaugural Short Story Collection Prize, will recognize the theme of desperation. The difference is that the stories in ORC are more realistic in tone and the characters are shackled by the product of their bad decisions.

“I wrote a lot about the aftermath of pain, whereas in Simplify I wrote about being in the moment of despair,” Goldberg says of the difference between the two collections. “The older you get the more you reckon with your own mortality, your own sadness, and of course your own sense of what you would have done differently. I was coming at abandonment and loss as a more mature person.”

Goldberg’s sense of maturity as a person parallels the darker complexities of love and regret in ORC. Two of the ten stories revolve around Tania, an itinerant casino cocktail waitress who has “failed to recognize how the weight of finally making a decision could be so paralyzing.” At 35, she decides to take a lucky night’s winnings and adopt a tween daughter from Russia, who abandons her before they form the bond that Tania expected. Fifteen years later, in “Palm Springs,” Tania’s still seeking understanding.

Were it not for OV Books, Tania’s story might not have even made it to the shelf. In contrast to his big-house experience, Goldberg says the editorial collaboration with OV started with each word and every line and extended into marketing and promotion.

“It was the first time in my career that a publisher asked me ‘What do you want?’?” he says. “It was inspiring.”

Unlike the characters’ decisions in ORC, Goldberg’s decision where to submit the collection was simple.

Goldberg reads Thursday 8 at Barbara’s Bookstore.

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