PRAYING FOR RAIN

by Chris Spain ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 1990

This first collection of 12 (mostly very short) stories, originally published in The Quarterly, Story Quarterly, The Antioch Review, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, are prose raps. Sometimes their first-person hard-edged voices work, and other times they come across as too clever, too anxious to be hip and contemporary. The best: ""Entrepreneurs,"" in which the narrator and his friends, armed with The Start-Up Entrepreneur, go out to see the space shuttle take off; when it explodes, they gather pieces of it, intending to sell them, only to have them confiscated. The prose is jazzy, and the narrator cops an attitude (contemporary corporate cynicism) that Spain both takes seriously and satirizes. Even this story, however, is mannered in places: ""Harold was reading the musts when they vaporated."" In general, the pieces here suffer from such language, which is initially intriguing and finally superficial, more glitzy than useful. But it does dazzle for a while, and to good effect, in ""Infant's Big Ache,"" where private language stands in for a characters grief for a lost buddy, still palpable decades after WW II; in ""Playing Iwo Jima,"" where a farm game is merged through language with Vietnam post-traumatic shock; and in ""Grave Digging,"" where a group of friends travel into the hills during a guerrilla war and dig into an Indian grave, only to find instead ""the disappeared."" In ""Pilot Flying Cover"" and ""Retard Gigging,"" however, the same strategy calls too much attention to Spain. Of the others, ""Let the Babies Keep Their Hearts"" and ""Horizontal Light"" are notable as slices-of-life where the style, more controlled, is subsidiary to character; both stories deal with a young, aimless narrator who no longer quite belongs with his friends. A precocious debut, then, though a formulaic one that juxtaposes a private language to public bleakness. A writer worth watching.

Pub Date: April 2, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Capra

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION