When Gwyn eventually hits his stride, he’s terrific. An auspicious first.
Eight linked stories cast a baleful light on fear, loathing, and sexual repression in the Bible Belt.
Brace yourself for immersion in a world of sinners and saved, backsliders and revivals, where women are often Satan’s means of tempting men and two men coupling are the ultimate abomination. It is a world seen up close in the “boring, stale, weary little town” of Perser, Oklahoma, dominated by its First Pentecostal church. The opening stories don’t quite work. “Of Falling” contrasts its passive, tight-lipped protagonist’s near-fatal fall and excruciating dreams with his posturing wife’s well-protected falls at revival meetings, while “Courtship” presents a Perser native who’s been in love with another man since they were playmates—though Jansen, scared silly by his church, doesn’t see himself as gay. This drawn-out story has a plaintive Carson McCullers quality, but Gwyn flubs Jansen’s climactic declaration, compensating with a closing image of heterosexual perversion worthy of Kraft-Ebbing. Then come two effective vignettes: “Against the Pricks” has 14-year-old Gabriel, tormented by self-abuse but cleansed by a revival, lashing out viciously at a sweetly innocent potential girlfriend, while in “In Tongues,” not even the pastor is safe from the Devil. Losing the gift of tongues, the Reverend Hassler spews filth from the pulpit, wrecking his ministry. Not all the insights into Pentecostalism are negative—Spencer, a lonely liberal in “Truck,” envies his God-struck mother’s “simple abandon”—yet the powerful and well-plotted closing pieces are a no-holds-barred indictment of fundamentalism run amok. In “The Backsliders,” some kids stumble on two guys having sex in a cave, and an enraged church elder batters one of them so hard he kills him. “Dog on the Cross,” true to its title, is about a puppy found nailed to an outdoor cross during a weeks-long revival conducted by a mesmerizing teenage preacher. It’s an exciting whodunit with an obvious suspect, a reclusive easterner, though the physical evidence points to the evangelists themselves.
When Gwyn eventually hits his stride, he’s terrific. An auspicious first.Pub Date: March 26, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-412-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991; Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories linked by their disagreeable narrator—a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference. But this eventually recovering slacker reveals in these deceptively thin tales a psyche so tormented and complex that we allow him his bleak redemption. Gobbling whatever drugs he can, the nameless narrator witnesses a fatal car wreck while hitchhiking and experiences a strange euphoria. His highs can be sharp, edgy, and intense, resulting in casual violence and emotional disconnectedness (``Dundun''); or sluggish, as he threatens to nod out before our eyes. At a local gin mill (``Out on Bail'') with his fellow losers, he ponders arbitrary fate among those who fancy themselves ``tragic'' and ``helpless.'' After shooting heroin with his girlfriend at a Holiday Inn, he finds his ``mother'' in an angelic barmaid (``Work''). There's plenty of drug-induced surrealism as well: a stranger, feigning muteness, hitches a ride (``Two Men''); a man walks into an emergency room with a knife stuck in his eye (``Emergency''); and a cruising salesman from Ohio pretends to be a Polish immigrant (``The Other Man''). In ``Dirty Wedding,'' the same narrator proves his cowardice and contemptibility while waiting for his girlfriend at an abortion clinic. ``Steady Hands at Seattle General'' transcribes a loopy, poetic dialogue in a detox ward, where the narrator meets someone more jaded and bruised than himself. In recovery, he works part-time at a Phoenix home for the old and hopeless—some so deformed ``they made God look like a senseless maniac.'' While there, he dates a dwarf, takes his Antabuse, and begins peeping on a Mennonite couple who live by his bus stop. All this to remind us that God shows up in all the wrong places, and angels are everywhere. Blunt and gritty: Johnson's beautifully damned stories sing with divine poetry, all the while bludgeoning us with existential reality.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17892-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short preface by Philip Young explains the raison d'etre of this presentation of the Nick Adams stories which here are arranged chronologically and therefore provide a continuity — from child to adolescent to soldier to writer — and reveal the character developmentally. There are eight new stories constituting 40% of the book and extending its interest as unpublished rather than merely republished Hemingway.
Pub Date: April 17, 1972
ISBN: 0684169401
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
