From Amazon.com
Traveling salesmen, small-time hustlers, hitchhikers, harried fathers, and sex-obsessed sons: Rick DeMarinis's stories take men at the end of their rope, then give them just enough line for things to get interesting. Robert Bly-style rhetoric drives a burned-out high school teacher to violence in "Wilderness"; answering a Help Wanted ad leads to disastrous results in "Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs." In charting the downward arc of their character's lives, DeMarinis's smart, self-conscious tales run the gamut from experimental fables to down-to-earth realism. In "Insulation," for example, his protagonist has a genetic predisposition for being struck by lightning; the gently naturalistic "Voice of America," on the other hand, follows a 17-year-old boy who both loves and resents his promiscuous mother and dreams "of waking up as someone else, in a different place, where things were decent."
Even those stories that begin as mere narrative exercises soon turn into things greater than the sum of their parts. "Romance: A Prose Villanelle," for example, crosses the preposterous conventions of a romance novel with the strict patterning of the villanelle (the famously difficult poetic form in which two lines are repeated at intervals throughout; think "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). The results are odd, hilarious, and curiously apt: "Silence slips into the bloated prose," one repeated passage tells us. "It invades each trumped-up scene.... It is there, smirking, when you begin, there in the middle, showing a wider grin, and it waits for you at the dead end--a surprise ending of dead paper, rustling with the last word." It's difficult for fiction to interrogate itself and engage the reader's sympathies, but DeMarinis pulls it off. In Borrowed Hearts, he shows himself one of the funniest and deadliest American writers at work today: a Flannery O'Connor for the Prozac age. --Magda Burns
From Publishers Weekly
"The Boys We Were, The Men We Became," the title of one of the 11 new stories in this compilation, also serves as shorthand for the themes that DeMarinis (The Year of the Zinc Penny) explores here. Taken together, the 21 intricately layered short narratives from previous collections and the new entries under the title "Borrowed Hearts" produce a poignant, dark yet often humorous portrait of American boyhood in the shadow of WWII, and American manhood in the gloom of confused values. Bludgeoned by misinformation from lost but overbearing adults, his boys find solace in the mechanics of ham radios and propeller planes. They become men confounded by hypocrisy, adultery and a tendency toward entropy. In "Fault Lines," AlfredoAstunned by his wife's indifference and the relentless chatter of his hyperactive young son, fearful of the directions his cholesterol and testosterone numbers are taking-- tells a colleague he's a peaceful man. "That's the world's number one oxymoron" is the reply. Leon in the title story is in his mid-60s when he develops an ability to smell the past and all the nostalgia it evokes; the cause is pathology, an aneurysm that has to be removed. Bernard, in "The Boys We Were..." can't understand how his father returned from the war both fat and empty. Most of his characters are sympathetic; however, DeMarinis also produces a number of grotesques: missile-silo watchmen, door-to-door salesmen, the couple who abandon their children. DeMarinis's true territory is the isolation of men who yearn for a home that doesn't exist, boys who learned to be James Dean, Aldo Ray, Marlon Brando, then grew up to discover there was no market for that facility, and became men with spiritual indigestion. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
