Sometimes Ridiculous, Sometimes Funny: A Review of Ravi Mangla's Visiting Writers

I grew up in Rochester, New York. Telling people that sometimes results in condolences. In 2006, then-governor Eliot Spitzer compared the area’s economy to that of Appalachia. The unemployment rate has been high for decades, with no end in sight. One urban improvement project after another fails spectacularly. The snow is as awful as you think and the local pro football team is, well, the Buffalo Bills. But I love the place. I miss it, a lot.

As an expatriate, I have a particular fondness for writers who are influenced by western New York. Their stories are infused with fatalism and the resulting grim humor that seemed to permeate my own childhood. Reading stories by writers like Nicholson Baker, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, and George Saunders is satisfying. For me, sometimes it’s also like going home. I have the same experience when I read stories by Rochester’s own Ravi Mangla, and especially his new collection, Visiting Writers.

Visiting Writers consists of twenty-four stories in which a nameless narrator encounters well-known writers. The encounters are unstuck in time, and all over the globe. J.D. Salinger buys gummi worms at the grocery store. Thomas Pynchon rubs perfume samples from magazines all over himself. Harper Lee goes bowling.

The situations these writers face are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes funny, and often both. But Mangla’s subtle positioning of the characters within these absurdities lets us experience vulnerability that feels authentic, especially when the circumstances do not. For example, “1988’s” Richard Yates:

“I sat next to Richard Yates on a plane to Los Angeles. He was knocking back glasses of bourbon. One, two, three, four. . . . Nervous, I asked. About what, he said, unwrapping a pair of saltines. The Times was folded, tucked between his leg and the arm rest, and I asked if he was reading it. He said he would be, but first he wanted to sleep.”

Ravi Mangla could have written these pieces in such a way that the Visiting Writers took the center stage that the collection’s title suggests. We could laugh at Flannery O’Connor in a bumper car or Italo Calvino asking for directions at a gas station, and get on with our lives. But little comes easy in a part of the world that politicians once believed could be saved by a high speed ferry. I like to think that’s part of the reason Mangla always seems to know, whether in Visiting Writers or his other work, that humor is truly cherished when it also shows us something we’ve always worked hard to keep a secret.