Gates of Eden: Stories

Gates of Eden: Stories

by Ethan Coen
Gates of Eden: Stories

Gates of Eden: Stories

by Ethan Coen

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

“A distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview...All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers Land, a parallel universe similar to our own—except it’s weirder, funnier, and better edited." — New York Times Book Review

The fiction debut of one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today, Ethan Coen.

In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories—from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061684883
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 11/11/2008
Series: P. S. Series
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 1,135,592
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Ethan Coen and his brother, Joel Coen, are multiple Oscar-winning American filmmakers who have written and directed a number of acclaimed motion pictures, including Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Fargo, and the 2007 Best Picture Academy Award winner, No Country for Old Men.

Read an Excerpt

A Morty Story

Uncle Morty asked to stay at my place last summer when he was coming to New York on a buying trip. He didn't want to pay fancy New York prices for a hotel. I said sure. I get along with Uncle Morty.

I asked my girlfriend, Astrid, if it was okay, not mentioning that I'd already said yes to Uncle Morty. It didn't matter because she said fine. She'd met him once and didn't mind him at all, and we have an extra little bedroom.

It was a hot day. The intercom buzzer sounded. I said, "Hello?"

"Hello, it's Uncle Morty. I'm here."

"Okay, Uncle Morty, I'll be right down." I'm on a third-floor walk-up and have to go down to let people in because there's no lock release on the intercom.

Uncle Morty had a little soft-sided suitcase and a worn brown briefcase. "Hello, it's Uncle Morty."

"Hiya, Morty, come on in." Uncle Morty is short and stocky and dark, with thick glasses. We went upstairs and Morty shook Astrid's hand. Astrid is tall and blond.

Morty said, "Morty Ruskin."

"You've met Astrid, Uncle Morty."

"Sure. I didn't know if she remembered."

"Your room is in here."

Later I said, "What do you want for dinner, Uncle Morty?"

"Oh, anything. You keep kosher, don't you?"

Uncle Morty had breakfast cereal. We offered to go out and get him kosher meat, but he insisted that the cereal was fine. The three of us sat on stools behind the kitchen counter and watched Matlock. Morty said, through a mouthful of cereal, "If she'd killed her husband she never would've left the gun. It's a weakness."

Morty left for his business the next morning before we got up. The bathroom wasstill steamy when I went in. Astrid got some kosher chicken that day. Morty returned at about five, carrying his worn brown briefcase, his tie loosened. It was still pretty hot.

When we were alone for a moment Morty said to me with his big unblinking stare, "Your girlfriend--is her name Trudy or Judy?"

"It's Astrid, Uncle Morty."

"Oh. Okay."

We ate watching TV again. Uncle Morty ate everything Astrid put in front of him, eyes glued to the TV. Afterward he insisted that he would wash the dishes. He asked Astrid if she had an apron. Up with the pillowcases and stuff she found one that released closet smells when she unfolded it. Morty stood at the sink in the creased apron, his sleeves rolled up, washing the dishes. Sweat beaded his temples. I was glad he was doing it. It gets hot in there.

I think it was the next morning there was a knock at our bedroom door. I put on a bathrobe and came out. Uncle Morty was wearing only his glasses and a towel around his waist. "The stopper inside the bathtub won't come up." He followed me into the bathroom. "I'm trying to take a shower and the water won't drain out." It was because the little lever that opens the drain gets stuck sometimes. You just have to play with it. I showed Uncle Morty, who stood staring through his glasses, his hands clasped behind his back, his belly pushed out.

I got back into bed but couldn't fall asleep.

For some reason Uncle Morty had reminded me of Edward G. Robinson. His face didn't particularly look like Edward G.'s. His lips weren't quite as big. And of course he didn't talk in that snarly way. But he had that short square-bellied body and his nipples were big and saggy with dark hair sworled around them. Not that I knew what Edward G. Robinson's nipples looked like.

Astrid was awake so I told her about it. She said, "You sound disturbed by it."

"It doesn't bother you?"

"Why should it?"

"Well, him and his body there, with his glasses on, waiting for the shower?"

". . . Yeah?"

Other than that, things went along okay. One day Uncle Morty told us he wouldn't be home for dinner. A friend had told him about the kosher dairy restaurant on Seventy-second Street and he was going to try it. Since Astrid, who was worried about the noise, didn't like having sex when Morty was in the house, we had it while he was gone. As I lay there afterward I imagined Uncle Morty in the kosher dairy restaurant, reading a folded-back newspaper through his big dark-framed glasses as he spooned borscht into his mouth.

The next day he ate at home again. I made spaghetti, which was a mistake because the kitchen alcove got all steamed up. We watched an old episode of Cheers. Uncle Morty's eyes were fixed on the TV as he lifted forkfuls of spaghetti to his mouth. He said, through a mouthful, "She was wearing a different dress the previous scene. It's the same day, though. What, she brings a change? It's a weakness."

In the evening Uncle Morty sat in the living room and read the paper and then a book about the history of China. I read a book called Captured by the Indians, a collection of first-hand accounts. Astrid was reading a murder mystery.

Morty fell asleep. His mouth gaped and his head lolled back, the overhead light sheeting his glasses. His hair, thinning at the crown, was tufted as if someone had gathered it into a fist and given it a long hard clench. He started snoring. At first the snores were just the dry rattle of breath sawing across his throat. Then, as he sucked more energetically, the snores warmed and moistened into a loud snarfing sound. They subsided for a mysterious moment, leaving the muted whoosh of distant traffic. Then they slammed back in, loud flaps of flesh and phlegm.

I was giggling. Astrid sat with her eyes fixed grimly on her book. I must say this pissed me off. She even silently shook her head, a judgment upon me.

Suddenly Morty strangled on a snore, his throat seizing up on an overly greedy inhale. He gagged, elaborately. His eyes shot open, and after a stupefied moment, his head swung round the room.

By the time I felt his eyes reach me I was looking back down at my book. I was still silently laughing, but my eyeline and an appreciative waggle of my head indicated some whimsy in the book. After a moment Morty cleared his throat and said:

"Dozed off."

I looked up, with Astrid.

"Did you?" she said.



Uncle Morty would telephone home. As Astrid and I sat reading and traffic noise floated in he would say "Honey? Honey? It's me. Honey?" He talked loud, as if they had just invented the telephone. "How is everything? Honey? How're the kids? How's Yaffee?" Yaffee was their dog. "Honey?"



"Say, you know," Morty said one day, "you don't have any fruit in the refrigerator." We have never had fruit in the refrigerator. We don't have stuff in the refrigerator. We go out and get stuff for dinner, night by night. Morty wasn't complaining, though. He wouldn't complain. He was only warning us that there was no fruit in the refrigerator.

* * *

I was laughing one day, just laughing, like a person will. Astrid said, "What?"

"I was just--I don't know. I was just thinking."

"What?"

"I was picturing Uncle Morty climbing up the stairs here to the apartment, with his briefcase, but he didn't have any arms and legs. Like that guy in Freaks. He was just wriggling up the stairs, you know, holding the briefcase handle in his teeth. Just a torso, you know. Wearing a diaper. Wriggling up the stairs."

"That's funny?"

"Well you know, he was still Uncle Morty, perfectly happy, coming home from work. He just didn't have any arms and legs. 'Honey? Honey? It's a weakness!' You know, still the same."

Astrid looked at me. She shook her head at me, which was bullshit, as if she were defending him, as if she were on his side and I wasn't. I like Uncle Morty. It wasn't a hostile thing.



It was the day for Morty to leave. He kissed Astrid goodbye, a little peck. I walked him down the stairs carrying his suitcase. At the door we shook hands and he told me to take care. He also said, "That girl Astrid is wonderful." This really pissed me off.

Later in the day we discovered that Morty had left us towels as a gift. A couple of months later Astrid dumped me.

What People are Saying About This

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

“Often funny, sometimes disturbing...Mr. Coen has sounded the jagged dissonance of the American experience.”

Interviews

On Tuesday, December 8th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Ethan Coen to discuss GATES OF EDEN.


Moderator: Welcome, Ethan Coen! Thank you for taking the time to join us online this evening to discuss your new book, GATES OF EDEN. How are you doing tonight?

Ethan Coen: I am doing swimmingly.


Roslyn Fleischer from rawinc@earthlink.net: Dear Mr. Coen: Was it difficult to make the transition from screenwriter to novelist? Or just different than expected, like everything else?

Ethan Coen: Yeah, I am not a novelist; they are short stories. And as to the transition, I really didn't do one and switch. I have been writing these stories as we have been making movies, so it wasn't the case that I switched from one to the other.


Pac87@aol.com from xx: It appears that you have a strong crime noir influence. Would you agree with that?

Ethan Coen: Yes, I have always like the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, and it is probably apparent in a lot of our movies and the stories in the collection as well.


Fan from USA: Any chance we will see any of the characters from GATES OF EDEN on the screen? Have we already seen any of these characters in any of your past projects, but in different names?

Ethan Coen: No, they were conceived as stories and written as stories, and my interest in them begins and ends there. They are prose things as opposed to movies, and the exercise of translating them is one that wouldn't interest me at all.


Niki from Niki_palek@yahoo.com: Have you read any other filmmaker novels like Peter Farrelly or Gus Van Sant? Whom do you like to read?

Ethan Coen: No, I haven't read them and didn't know they had books. I like to read the people I have just mentioned, and I am reading Lorrie Moore's stories right now. They are pretty funny.


Jonathan from Seattle, WA: First of all, let me say, your movies make me laugh so much, I rupture my eardrums. How did you like William H. Macy in "Fargo"? He's a swell actor. Anyway, in your opinion, what makes a good story?

Ethan Coen: If I knew that, I would be writing them, wouldn't I?


Sue from Canada: What is the most enjoyable part of writing to you?

Ethan Coen: I don't do any research, there are no separate components. There only is the composing, so that is just enjoyable when it is going well and not when it is not. There are not separate stages for me. I suppose writing a first draft is, but most of writing is rewriting, which is different from coming up with the first draft of the story.


Joshua from Boston, MA: Do we see Ethan Coen in any of these characters? Perhaps in Joe Carmody?

Ethan Coen: Hector Berlioz. I am Hector Berlioz.


Jon from New York: How would you compare the publishing industry versus Hollywood?

Ethan Coen: There is less money in it. It seems to be more genteel. There is less money in it for me, anyways. I don't know, it is New York based as opposed to L.A. and everything that that implies. There are no "Nate & Al's" in the publishing business.


Shirley from Boston: What to you is the biggest misconception about Hollywood?

Ethan Coen: That "Nate and Al's" is the Hollywood hot spot.


Kurtz from Bryn Mawr, PA: If you could make any novel into a movie, what would it be? Why?

Ethan Coen: It is funny that you should ask. For the first time we have adapted a novel for a movie that we hope to do. The novel is TO THE WHITE SEA by James Dickey -- his last novel. It is interesting to undertake as a movie because it is about an American airman shot down over Japan, so for obvious reasons he doesn't talk to anybody. In effect, it is a silent movie.


Bryan Sullivan from Chicago, IL: Hey Ethan, what were you like as a kid?

Ethan Coen: Younger. I don't know, you would have to ask somebody who knew me. It is pretty hard to characterize yourself.


Andrew from Cherry Point, NC: Do you see any cinematic trends happening as of late that scare you? What do you think when every reviewer pans a movie and it becomes the number one movie in America, like "The Waterboy"?

Ethan Coen: Well, there is nothing alarming about that. Trends? You know I think movies are pretty diverse, more than they were 30 or 40 years ago in the heyday of the studio system. People complain about big movies being all alike, but there are a lot of other movies out there as well. Reading trends is not something I am inclined to think about or that the current state of movies lends itself to particularly.


Turk from New York: GATES OF EDEN was good and all, but when are you going to write a full-length novel?

Ethan Coen: It is funny, I get asked that by journalists. The attitude is always exactly that: "This is all well and good, but when are you going to write a novel?" I never understand the question.


Pete from New Orleans, LA: Do you prefer writing books or making movies?

Ethan Coen: I like both. They are different, so one complements the other. One involves just me, the other involves different numbers of collaborators, starting with me and my brother just writing and growing to scores of people while we are shooting. So it is a very different experience from writing stories. But one is a relief from the other. I wouldn't want just one as a steady diet.


Andy from Hoboken, NJ: What are you currently working on?

Ethan Coen: In terms of movies, the one I mentioned, the James Dickey adaptation. In terms of stories, I have just started another one, but since I just started it, who knows whether it will even pan out?


Audrey from Dayton, OH: Do you have a pretty routine writing schedule? How do you have time to make movies and write books?

Ethan Coen: The stories I have written in my spare time; there is no schedule at all. It has been very undisciplined. Basically, I write when I find time and feel like it. Movie work sort of dictates its own scheduling requirements and deadlines, so that imposes a discipline on you, but for writing stories I have none.


Tom Champagne from Woonsocket, RI: Whom do you plan to cast in "To the White Sea"? Can we expect to see any classic Coen regulars?

Ethan Coen: Brad Pitt and a lot of Japanese people. None of those people qualify as "classic Coen regulars." Although for the future, who knows?


Jonathan from Seattle, WA: Who's the big, burly, beefy guy on the cover?

Ethan Coen: I don't know. That is a period photo, not a period re-creation. It is a photo that was found by the publisher; I am sure they don't know who it is. I tell people sometimes that I modeled for the cover....


James Champagne from Woonsocket, RI: Are you planning on writing any more novels in the future? Does your brother plan on writing any novels?

Ethan Coen: Yes. And no. But my brother is at work on a prose poem about Niagara Falls. I have read some of it, and it is very good, if you like that sort of thing.


Ronnie from Studio City, CA: Are there any actors in particular that you really enjoy working with?

Ethan Coen: You know obviously all the ones that we have worked with many times. But really, there are actors that we want to work with again but have only worked once, like Bill Macy, Holly Hunter, Jeff Bridges, Nick Cage, Al Finney, etc. The problem is not having enough parts for all the people that you want to work with.


Nelson from Fairfield, CT: What was the last movie or book that really made you laugh?

Ethan Coen: You know, the funny thing is I don't go to movies that frequently, but "Out of Sight" was great!


Randy from Bellingham, WA: Hello, Ethan. I am a huge fan of all your movies and am very curious to read your new book. Did you base the Dude on anybody in particular? Do you have a personal favorite among your movies? I loved "Raising Arizona"!

Ethan Coen: Yes, the Dude was loosely inspired by a couple of people that we know in L.A. Principally a guy named Jeff Dowd, who actually refers to himself in the third person as the Dude. But as I say, the emphasis is on "loosely." No, I don't have a favorite among our movies. You spend two years, more or less, working on one, and by the time you are finished with it you are happy enough to never think of it again.


Scott Ehlers from Hollywood, CA: If you and your brother were in a "celebrity death match" with the Farrelly brothers, who would win?

Ethan Coen: If it was Greco-Roman wrestling, we would win; if it was croquet or another inane lawn sport, they might.


Adam Miller from Illinois: What, to Ethan Coen, is the most important part of a good film? What about a novel?

Ethan Coen: Making the sprocket holes uniform. If they are not all the same size, it pops out of the gate in the projector and runs out onto the floor. It is very meticulous work.


Lenea from Lenea734@aol.com: Whom would you consider your cinematic influences? What about literary?

Ethan Coen: Influence, who's to say? I can tell you whom we like, similar for me and Joel, but that's also rather arbitrary, since it just depends to some extent on who pops into your head at the moment -- but certainly we both like Roman Polanski, Fellini, Kurosawa, Coppola, the Farrellys....


Mike from Sudbury, MA: What are the three most influential books in your life? What about the three most influential movies in Ethan Coen's life?

Ethan Coen: The Bible is the good book, of course. So I would like to list that three times. My three favorite movies would be "The Ten Commandments," the Charlton Heston "Ben Hur," and the Ramon Novarro "Ben-Hur."


Jonathan from Seattle, WA: If you could have lunch with a famous dead person, who would it be (if they weren't dead, that is)?

Ethan Coen: I just read an obituary for the woman who invented the Slinky -- that would probably be a very interesting lunch.


Moderator: Thank you, Ethan Coen! Best of luck with GATES OF EDEN. Do you have any closing comments for the online audience?

Ethan Coen: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it, thank you.


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