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ROPE BURNS

Name: ROPE BURNS
Author: F.X. Toole
ISBN: 0-06-019820-6

STORIES FROM THE CORNER

by F.X. Toole ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2000

Toole won't dazzle anyone with footwork, but there's a core of integrity to his fiction that can rivet a reader, patches of...

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A debut collection of six stories about the world of boxing, from an insider who finds beauty in its ugliness, sweetness in its savagery.

The title piece is a prime example: veteran trainer Mac McGee loves his young fighter, loves him for his talent and boundless willingness, but perhaps even more for the goodness as natural to him as the grace and power of his punches. Mac is white, “Puddin’” Pye, the boy, black, but from the day they met the relationship was transcendently father and son, color an irrelevance. The beginning of the story deals with that warmth and caring between them. A bit too predictably—nuance is not Toole's strength—the mood darkens, foreshadowing the kind of extravagant violence that links all six of the tales. In “Frozen Water,” a naïve country boy is beaten almost to death by a conscienceless bully. In “Million $$$ Baby,” a young woman boxer, sucker-punched by her treacherous opponent, has a freak fall and breaks her neck. “The Monkey Look” is about a fighter who's taken far too many merciless shots to the head and eyes. And so on. Worthwhile people suffer terrible punishment from no-goods, who often as not get away with it. In Toole's world, justice is at best an in and outer. He'd like it to be different, but this long-time, real-life corner man has stanched too much blood from too many illegal blows to believe in fantasy. Instead, he'll settle for the “magic” so vividly depicted here—the iron magic “of will, skill, and pain.”

Toole won't dazzle anyone with footwork, but there's a core of integrity to his fiction that can rivet a reader, patches of awkwardness notwithstanding. The wallop is in the details.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000

ISBN: 0-06-019820-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000

Categories:

SHORT STORIES | SPORTS & RECREATION

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WESTERN ELECTRIC

by Don Zancanella ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 1996

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Selected by Oscar Hijuelos, this 1996 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award brings together eight stories set in the West, predominantly in Wyoming. As unadorned as the western plains, these tales feature some distinctive characters described in functional, no-frills prose. Originally published in literary magazines, Zancanella's tales move back and forth in time, summoning both the wild days of the 19th century and the present age of corporate ranching. They also explore the days between these eras, including the Cold War period, when Wyoming was first dotted by missile silos. Those edgy times are recalled in ``Disarmament,'' the story of a teacher in remote Wyoming who strikes up a friendship with a military man in charge of maintaining the now-empty silos. The '60s also meant the dawn of TV on the range, an event celebrated in ``Television Lies,'' tracing the excitement evoked in isolated homes by the first transmissions from Cheyenne. ``Cynthia Rising'' explores an uneasy cross-cultural friendship between an Indian boy, living in a small western town, and several of his white classmates. ``Thomas Edison by Moonlight'' views the famous man from the perspective of a 16- year-old aspiring inventor who seeks Edison out, only to discover that the Wizard of Menlo Park is as much a huckster as a genius, traveling in the West in search of pliable investors, not kindred spirits; the 19th-century journal-writer of ``The Chimpanzees of Wyoming'' records his affection for the two apes he displays in saloons across the West. Zancanella's interest in the eccentric figures attracted to the frontier is also in evidence in the contemporary tale of a waitress in Montana who invents an alternate self—an astronomer who predicts the end of the world, to be signalled by a solar eclipse. ``The Electric Evangelist'' chronicles the spiritual conversion of a telephone lineman after he survives being struck by lightning. An earnest debut—Zancanella could develop into a regional writer of interest.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1996

ISBN: 0-87745-567-8

Page Count: 130

Publisher: Univ. of Iowa

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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THE MONKEY SUIT

AND OTHER SHORT FICTION ON AFRICAN AMERICANS AND JUSTICE

by David Dante Troutt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1998

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A first collection of ten thematically related short stories examining the root causes of historical incidents that involved black Americans and culminated in well-known court cases. Rutgers law professor Troutt appends to the stories an informative Afterword identifying four that were based on actual Supreme Court cases and defending the technique he (justly) calls ``storytelling scholarship.'' The tales themselves, which travel in time from preCivil War days to 1994 (with the O.J. Simpson trial well underway), employ a pleasing variety of subjects, omniscient and involved narrators, and racially mixed protagonists, but several are marred by accusatory climactic authorial interpolations. Troutt's imaginative power displays itself immediately in the opening story (``Glow in the Dark''), in which a slave is tempted to run away by the rope that binds him to a sleeping deputy sheriff. Though the surreal fantasy is itself handled skillfully, the narrating voice uses a thick dialect that impedes a reader's progress through the tale. Many of its companion pieces are much better, including ``The Bargain'' (about a black-white partnership destroyed by segregated housing laws); ``For Love of Trains'' (an affecting portrayal of the afflicted family of one of the Scottsboro boys); and ``Tell About Tellin' '' (a drugged-out young black's account of the 1967 Detroit riots). And in the ambitious title story, Troutt offers a rich, detailed characterization of a Yale- educated black attorney whose uncertain status in a mostly white law firm reaches a crisis point when an unfairly ``deferred'' promotion forces him to undertake a discrimination suit. More dramatic than brief summaries may make them seem, Troutt's passionately conceived tales effectively survey a broad spectrum of American life then and now, and persuasively document a continuing history of intolerance and injustice. An impressive and unusual debut performance.