- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (May 3 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312286058
- ISBN-13: 978-0312286057
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 14.2 x 2.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #877,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
In his collection At the Jim Bridger, Ron Carlson exhibits an old-fashioned humanity. He not only believes in the self, he believes that it's a good thing. The men and boys in these stories stumble into quietly critical moments that invite them to surrender their integrity. Some succumb, some don't, but the author himself is clearly never in doubt that integrity exists and that it matters. The problem is brought up most explicitly in the exquisite, funny opening story, "Towel Season." Edison is a theoretical engineer who lives with his young family in a chummy suburb. Over the course of one summer--one "towel season"--Edison pursues a slippery engineering problem by day and socializes with his neighbors by night. The other dads all work in applied engineering, and they exert a gentle pressure on Edison to get his head out of the clouds. Normal life tugs at Edison, tempting him. His resistance turns the piece into an oddly resonant love story.
Short-fiction fans have likely bumped into "The Ordinary Son" in one anthology or another. It's the unforgettably comic story of the only nongenius in a family of geniuses: "I was hanging out sitting around my bare room, reading books, the History of This, the History of That, dry stuff, waiting for my genius to kick in." At the Jim Bridger is a convention of just such fascinating, ordinary characters. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
In this taut, focused collection, veteran short story writer Carlson (The Hotel Eden) captures the ordinary occurrences that define our lives. Sharing graceful, unadorned prose and elegant metaphors, the nine stories and two brief sketches collected here portray characters at moments when the solid ground of reality slips out from under them. High school figures prominently: for Carlson, the teenage years offer the perfect transitional moments, when minor incidents are writ large. Fortunately, he depicts these mundane experiences a boy's first date ("The Potato Gun"), his first fistfight ("At Copper View"), his first car ("The Ordinary Son") with neither condescension nor irony, but a mixture of serious reflection and naive wonder. In "The Ordinary Son," Reed's average intelligence in a family of geniuses makes him its only distinctive member; he amazes his young brother, who is practicing quantum physics with crayons, with the simple pleasure of his brand-new car. Elsewhere, the teenager's unique sense of alienation is a chronic condition: in "Towel Season," Edison's absorbing interest in a highly theoretical engineering project separates him from the neighborhood husbands and wives; in the title story, Donner's recounting of a near-death incident on a camping trip leads to a brief connection between him and a woman who is not his wife. With a precision and consistency rarely achieved in similar collections, this volume should earn Carlson continued, well-deserved recognition. National advertising; author tour.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
so-so,
By
This review is from: At the Jim Bridger: Stories (Hardcover)
It's endearing, as long as you're a white male American who has gone fishing and backpacking at some point in his lifetime. My only problem is in the title short story, the only one I read. The narrator fails to tell us how much of the story he experienced with the other guy he shares with the woman he is passing off to the other guy at this bar/restaurant he's in called the Jim Bridger. The lack of the specific details as to how much she knows distracts from the honesty of the story. We fail to understand how much she knows, a distance from the woman's perception which is pitiful and never restored from the insight we are shown with her psychological realism drawn so clearly in the beginning when she enjoys the beer. I also fail to see how enlightening it is for a woman to be dragged around like a dog on a leash and passed on from one unfortunate midwestern hick to another. The story short changes my American experience with a frontier-type homosocial machismo.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Decency, hope, integrity, love,
By
This review is from: At the Jim Bridger: Stories (Hardcover)
There is a decency about the characters in Ron Carlson's short stories that is never sappy, that rings true. And missing is that element so common in so much of today's fiction--smartalecky irony. His people may seem naive, but they also seem real, yearning for completion, meaning in their lives. Ron Carlson is a major short story writer, in the same league as Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.
5.0 out of 5 stars
He knows more about the human heart in conflict with itself,
By
This review is from: At the Jim Bridger: Stories (Hardcover)
than anybody. "At the Jim Bridger" is Carlson's third book of short stories in a row; each time I didn't think it was possible for him to surpass himself, but somehow he does. His whimsical, funny, sad stories about love and lost and possibility are far truer to me than Carver's stories of dissolution. Carlson has the amazing ability to tell a sweet or happy story without selling out to melodrama or senimentality; he can tell a gut-wrenching story of loss and despair without giving in entirely to cynicism and morbidity. I can't tell you how many friends who tell me "I don't like books of short stories" I've converted to worshippers of Carlson over the years through gifts of "Plan B for the Working Class" and "Hotel Eden"; now I have a new axe to grind, and grind it I will. I can't wait to see his new novel next year.
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