Book Review: Capers and Switcheroos

Reviewed by Eric Mayrhofer

Chip Cater’s short stories shine with compassion, wisdom, wit, and warmth

Memories don’t play out like feature-length movies. They happen in flashes, fits, and starts. Sometimes a memory can bubble up to the surface of your mind with a very clear point, and sometimes they ramble or roll by for no other reason than to remind you of something pleasantly familiar.

Those are characteristics that Chip Cater’s collection Capers and Switcheroos embodies beautifully. Transforming his memories into short stories, he lets readers into his mind and gives them the joy of experiencing his admiration and love, his childhood mischief, and the quiet humility that comes with age.

And it truly does feel like each story is a little door into Cater’s mind. That’s partly due to flourishes like the quick, easy nicknames that pepper his writing. When recalling his wedding in “Blue Velvet,” the opening story, he says, “We were married in the Congregational Church, which stands on the hill over the tiny string of stores and restaurants in Wellfleet. The Congo’s tall steeple towers over the town and is what you aim for when sailing back in from the outer reaches of Wellfleet harbor.”

Those small but irreverent choices, nestled in an otherwise matter-of-fact tone, help readers see that Cater doesn’t take life too seriously, even as he regards it with a sharp eye respectfully studying everything it lands on.

That matter-of-fact voice could also be called openness—even earnestness. In the same story, Cater’s wife winds up having to change into a borrowed dress, a dazzling blue number with sparkling stones. The incident is briefly the talk of the restaurant, and when Cater and his wife leave, “twelve to fifteen ‘fans,’ who had watched the drama unfold, rushed up…They wanted Mary’s autograph. After the scenes in the bar and dining room and the changes of costume, they were positive she was a celebrity. She still is.” Then later, in the story “Something Noticed,” he and Mary find themselves in Vietnam and notice there are no birds; the Vietnamese ate them into scarcity due to food shortages that began in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Cater reflects, “We have hundreds of beautiful birds, many of whom sing…it is our palette and our symphony.”

In just a few words, Cater reveals so much: his bounding love for his wife Mary. The couple’s quiet awareness of all their blessings, humble in the knowledge that so many have far less.

There are one or two stories that err on the rambling, rolling side of memory. “Saved by the Belle,” for example, may luxuriate a little too long in the technological details of early digital publishing for some. Even then, however, readers glimpse our narrator’s open-hearted kindness as he remembers a workplace rival. “Dan left and went to our largest competitor,” Cater writes. “He did well and we stayed in touch over the years…we had a shared interest.” Even in adversity, obstacles never become permanent barriers to good relationships, politeness, or decency.

Caper and Switcheroos is a quietly moving piece, a comforting blanket of a short story collection.

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