Tony Rauch, whose ability to manipulate the short story form is magnificentTony Rauch

Tony Rauch’s What If I Got Down On My Knees is a compilation of short stories about, essentially, the human condition. It’s no light read, and if you’re a fan of a steady and continuous stream of dramatic narrative, this is not for you. However, there is a certain charm about the random disjointedness of the separate narratives, with no apparent link between them. Some are tragic, some are laugh out loud; all of them are gripping.

At first I was not entirely keen, but Rauch’s mixture of styles for each individual tale and the sympathetic and unique characters he creates with equal flare for each little snippet ultimately drew me in.

The opening story, In The Dust, at first thwarted my expectations because the protagonist was called Elmer; however, once I got over my searing disappointment that the character introduced was a grizzled, human dog-knapper, as opposed to the fictional rainbow elephant of my childhood, I began to enjoy what turned out to be a heart-rending tale - and In The Dust isn’t the only one to tug at the heartstrings.

However, the real beauty of Rauch’s literary masterpiece is his ability to effortlessly blend humour into an otherwise quite sombre book. His gem, Let’s Get Sad, for instance, details the plight of a bunch of sexually frustrated teenage boys who bawl their eyes out at Bambi in order to get the sensitive, arty-type girls to like them, which is guaranteed to give you at least a few laughs.

The problem with short story collections is that they tend to be rather hit-and-miss, and unfortunately Rauch’s anthology is no different. There are certain instances in which he pushes the need for humour too far, and the result leans towards the ridiculous and rather strange: for example in Lesser Gods, where an unlucky (this is truly an understatement) man gets tangled in the harness of a horse-drawn carriage bearing his prospective date, somehow ends up in a fire, jeered at by some yobbish teenagers who also have the vocabulary of characters from a Jane Austen novel, and roundly insulted by the socially-impaired woman of his dreams, whom he re-Christens ‘Monkey Butt’ as waiting staff tend to his First Degree burns. Some are really thoroughly odd, like Congratulations, in which a man magically produces a baby created from his own stomach fat – if there’s a nuanced underlying meaning here, I’m missing it.

Nevertheless, while What If I Got Down On My Knees is subject to fault, much like most other books, its flaws should not be allowed to cast a pall over what really is, in parts, some exceptional writing.

Despite not normally being a fan of literary romances, Debra is an absolutely exquisitely written piece about a teenager of undefined gender in hopeless unrequited love in the Bible Belt of America. The author uses stunning turns of phrase, and none of the clichéd and often nauseating tones that tend to feature so heavily in the modern romance trope.

Rauch’s stories are engaging, and most importantly, very readable – there’s not one ounce of pretentiousness or self-indulgence in his writing, and the varying lengths of the extracts are perfect for the student readership who, like me, have an incredibly short attention span and want to flit through a few pages of a novel at a time to procrastinate from yet another essay.

Rauch must also be credited for how he makes his characters noticeably distinct – through their accents, gender, aims and ambitions – even though every story is written in the first person. Significantly, the protagonist of each narrative is never once called by their first name by the other characters, nor mentions it themself, which allows the reader to immerse themself even further in the story, and impart the author’s point that despite humankind’s fundamental differences with each other, everyone is essentially held together by the same desires, needs and human frailties.

For short-story lovers, I would definitely recommend it.