Martin Golan

The Arena" is a short story written by Martin Golan. I am going through this task to analyze and interpret this text. The text sheds light on several different areas. This means that the text comes in on topics, such as nervousness, stress, discomfort, family, children, etc. It’s easy to like the lilt in Martin Golan’s writing: his word choices are crisp and his tone effervescent. The twelve stories in his collection Where Things Are When You Lose Them snap, crackle, and pop in their examination of modern travails. Suburbia is, for the most part, Golan’s milieu, and it’s one he negotiates well. His characters tend to be white and affluent, and the rigors of the working day or making ends meet are not such a concern. Rather, Golan takes on matters of the heart in times of testy human behavior. He uses hefty topics—ranging from sexual etiquette to domestic abuse to the grim specter of assisted living—to catapult his people into their moment of reckoning. Many of the stories have a straightforward structure: a phrase or image is introduced, used symbolically to counterpoint the action, and then returns to wrap things up in the denouement. The typical narrator is a middle-aged male, looking back at a life-defining episode. This perspective can be poignant, as in “The Shape of Water,” in which the protagonist reminisces about a love lost amongst the emotional debris left by swinging couples in the 60s; the stirring image of his lover diving off a boat into the ocean is its central metaphor. “When Annie Fell Off the Mountain” uses its freeze-frame of a woman (also suspended in mid-air) to draw us into a story of unwanted pregnancy in the days before legal abortion, which, despite the gravity of its subject, allows for some dark comedy in the confusion that comes from juggling too many agendas and bad directions.