THIS KIND OF MAN

Murphy ponders the inner workings of men in this collection of literary short stories.

In the title story, a widower contemplates what he’s learned about fatherhood—and cooking—in the aftermath of his wife’s death. A boy responds to his dad’s tough love in “Winning” by working to best him athletically, unprepared for what that might mean. A frustrated man in a gentrifying resort town in “Now’s the Time” repeats cliched bits of wisdom to himself as he hikes toward a date with destiny. In “Philippi,” a lawyer tags along to his girlfriend’s high school reunion in a small West Virginia mining town, only to realize the reunion isn’t the real reason she’s going back. Across these and 17 other stories, Murphy probes the questionable ways that men move through the world, charting their actions’ impacts on others and on themselves. In other tales, for example, a dad ignores his son’s concussions, an undocumented migrant runs from the dangers of a new country, and a concerned brother feels betrayed when he discovers his sister has a secret partner. The best stories connect its characters’ behaviors to historical forces of American life; in one memorable story, “Red State Sewer Side,” a boy relocates with his family from town to town, fighting off bullies at school as his father lays off workers on his company’s behalf. Murphy excels at evoking the expression of toxic masculinity in its many forms: “I don’t even know where you came from,” the cruel father in “Winning” frequently tells his son, as well as “I should sue the hospital for malpractice….They gave me the dumb one by mistake.” But not every story finds a use for such toxicity, once it’s summoned. Several pieces read like essays or sketches, rather than full-fledged stories; characters are rarely named, and physical locations are often left undescribed. Murphy’s uses of rhetorical questions, shocking reveals, and the present-tense, second-person perspective often read as bids for urgency, but readers may instead wish instead that the characters and their difficult worlds were more fully developed.

A bold but roughly sketched set of stories.