THE WAY THAT WATER ENTERS STONE: Stories

by John Dufresne ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 1991

Disappointment and abandonment, death and decay, loss and betrayal: such is the stuff of Dufresne's dozen hard-luck stories in this debut collection--some of which have appeared in Yankee, The Quarterly, and The Missouri Review. The occasional humor here is usually at the expense of Dufresne's pathetic characters, a motley bunch of deadbeats, rejects, and proletarian losers. The funniest pieces are also rather predictable bits of Deep South shenanigans. In ""The Freezer Jesus,"" the face of Christ appears on the corroded refrigerator of an Old brother and sister in backwoods Louisiana, also the setting for the longest story, ""The Fontana Gene,"" the saga of a poor white family who are proof of a reverse Darwinism, ""survival of the sorriest."" More downbeat is ""Must I Be Carried to the Sky on Flowered Beds of Ease?""--a portrait of a lonely old man, abandoned by his wife and sons, who has one of the latter return home to die from what seems to be AIDS. The other southern story is an unconvincing historical piece about a sheriff in small-town Florida in 1955, a grim tale of adultery, murder, and suicide among the lowlife. The New England working-class Catholics in most of the other stories recall the work of Andre Dubus pere et fils. There's the family man of ""A Long Line of Dreamers,"" who laments his own boring life when he learns that his alcoholic brother-in-law is dying of cancer. There's the schoolteacher turned taxi driver of the title story, who hasn't recovered from his wife leaving him. And there's the equally pitiful narrator of ""Hard Time the First Time,"" who couldn't consummate his marriage 22 years ago and can't save his retarded friend from his worst instincts--a predilection for pubescent girls--in the present. In other stories, young boys watch their grandfathers resign themselves to defeat, and old widows desperately cling to their last good memories. Dufresne's talent for mimicking a number of familiar voices cannot disguise his inability to develop his own.

Pub Date: March 18, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION