SURRENDER AND OTHER STORIES

Hiltner’s short story collection explores loss, alienation, and regret.

The author assembles nearly two dozen short stories, most of them so brief the entire books falls well short of 200 pages. They are impressionistic glimpses of time, painted in the broadest of literary strokes. Most of the stories assembled are presented by an unnamed narrator who communicates in informally anecdotal terms. The brevity of the pieces leaves little room for intricate plots and character development; in fact, the author often doesn’t name the people in his narratives. Hiltner seems much more interested in conjuring a saturnine atmosphere, a gloomy ambience meant to haunt rather than titillate. In “Tecumseh,” an old Native American hermit occupies the land that once belonged to his forebears and quietly whiles away his days until he dies. The narrator of the story relates his remembrance of the old man—“Tecumseh” is the name White people dismissively give him—and the fear his inscrutability instilled in the narrator as a 12-year-old boy. While there is virtually no plot, Hiltner evokes a sense of anguished but dignified loss on the part of Tecumseh, who is simultaneously proud of his heritage and mortified by its destruction. Similarly, in “Jim, Nell, and Kate,” Vernon, a farmer, bitterly disappointed by life and hopelessly locked in a “loveless marriage of convenience,” expresses his frustration through cruelty to his family, though he treats his horses well. Again, there is little plot to speak of, but the author deftly paints a portrait of a man defeated, developing Vernon into the most fully realized character in the entire collection.

For the most part, Hiltner’s prose is plainly foursquare, unembellished, and lucid (“There was always the smell and always the sun. It was there when you deplaned in Tan Son Nhat, you could not escape it once you arrived, and for the rest of your life you could never be free from the memory of the smell of Vietnam.”) When he reaches for emotional heights, he sometimes strains laboriously, missing poignancy and hitting earnest sentimentality. In “There is Something I Want to Tell You,” two brothers fight overseas in World War II—both are unnamed, which contributes to the tale’s sterility—but only the younger brother makes it home. When the war’s end was in sight, the older brother expressed a desire to meet his younger brother in England, and it tortures the younger man to never know why: “He would never understand that all it was, was a way for the older to say goodbye, to say he was not coming home to the family, or to his store, or to the places in which they had grown up.” The story feels like an abstraction— neither the characters nor their lives feel substantial, and as a result the despair the younger brother suffers remains remote from the reader. This is the characteristic failing of the entire collection—while all the stories are thoughtfully rendered, they are often so threadbare they lack dramatic resonance. The stories feel like sketches to be more thoroughly elaborated upon at a later date, or academic exercises assigned in a collegiate writing class.

Dark, thoughtful stories, hampered by a lack of concreteness and intimacy.