Another short story collection.
Whether fantasizing or acting out their guilty desires, Boyd’s characters are neither at peace with themselves or others. Unsurprisingly, they provoke situations in which someone is going to get hurt. Sometimes humorous, mostly sad, always solidly written. ![]() It’s 1891 in Butte, Montana, a town filled with Irish miners and dissolution, and poet manqué but consummate wastrel and opium addict Tom Rourke meets spunky Polly Gillespie, newly-wed to a dry stick of a man but not married to a loveless existence and before you know it, we are joining the young runaway lovers on an unprettified, achingly intense flight and romance through the wilds of the American west. Under icy stars and suffering a love that you feel in your own blood and bones, their faithful Palomino takes them where their fate and bravado must go, with curious characters and hunters on that trail. What a pair of desperados they make, Tom the hapless hero, Polly the more knowing, if equally vulnerable, of our hope-cursed sweethearts. Their voices are utterly real, common and sublime. The brightest star of the brilliant tale is the language itself. The entire novel is a prose poem. Barry is one of those Irish writers who make English a language of their poetic very own. Open the book at any page and you will find imagery to charm with its surprise. Such a prosaic an object as a radiator “throbbed like a fat little sun god”, while “an acre of starlings” is a “a great thumbprint forming and breaking and reforming”. “The clear light of day was a kind of forgiveness.” Stories with portentous momentum that carries them and their characters to sometimes startlingly inevitable endings. In what was her first publication, Keegan brings out the pain and longing, the understandable and questionable acts of human relationship in mature and unflinching exposure.
The writing is true and bright as ice. You can tell that she has edited like a butcher paring away the fat to leave the words clean cut and lean. The paragraph should “go into, not on about the subject,” she said once, the comment of one who knows her craft. As a matter of course, a set of stories is often tied to a certain place and culture. What I found worked very well in these is, as we switch from rural Ireland to the American South—Keegan writes authoritatively on both—the stories refresh each other with alternating voices and expectations. You know how Elmore Leonard said: “I try to leave out the parts people skip”? Best writing advice I ever heard. Well, Barry Hannah is a master of it. He can make Carver sound wordy. Hannah gives you the poetic American South in all its heart-wrenching brutality. Of these twenty, some are real short. Stories that last as long as a song, strength and beauty packed into a box the characters cannot fight a way out of. Rich in imagination and turn of phrase, almost sexually intense, he is not trying to be smart, but is so anyway. Just superb.
When it comes to American short stories, I found Richard Ford’s last collection, Sorry For Your Trouble, well-crafted but predictable, stale even, the same tropes revisited. No new light comes to pierce his dim view on life. But he can certainly spot and pick some good’uns by other writers, and although there’s a tendency to be period pieces about family and place, the standard in this selection is high.
I particularly liked C.S Godshalk’s The Wizard and there were two that made me sit up and really take notice—you know, that lift you get when something really interesting is going on in the writing: Car-Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson and How to Talk to a Hunter by Pam Houston. More short stories.
Disturbing, moving, stylish in a good, old-fashioned way. A book for the winter fireside. I got so excited about the first story that I thought I’d struck genius. I found the other stories fabulously inventive, original and just a whole bunch of fun and dream logic let loose—Secret Identity and The Lesson are outstanding—but it was “The Summer People” that really got me. It’s the way the sassy but abandoned and put-upon girl protagonist presents the outlandish circumstance as if it’s tiresome (she has, in fact, had enough of it) that works so brilliantly well.
Kelly Link does this thing where she slips something utterly weird into the narrative while you’re not watching and makes out it’s perfectly normal. I adore this trick. She can also be very amusing and for that I, for one, am thankful. Misery is present in most people’s existence and serious fiction must deal with this reality, but it need not acquiesce in it and there has, also, to be an antidote. Superheroes, a recurring theme, are presented as working people with a difficult job to do. “Sometimes you’ll be fighting somebody, this real asshole, and you’ll be both be getting winded, and then you start noticing his outfit and he’s looking, too, and then you’re both wondering if you got your outfits at this same place.” And how about: “Werewolf Boyfriends go on and on about the environment, and also are always trying to get you to go running with them.” And there are the mermaids, “an invasive species, like the iguanas. [….] they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures”. |
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