From Publishers Weekly
In "Wet," this anxiety-prone collection's fine lead story, two teenage brothers struggle against nature and their overbearing stepfather in an odd, real estate-grabbing task: stretching barbed wire across a portion of Florida lake as a lightning storm sets in. Inauspicious as this scenario may seem for exploring troubled family dynamics or the acid reflux of fear, Tester (Darling) escalates the narrator's hungover awkwardness, his older brother Jim's competitiveness and their stepfather Lloyd's bullying to a fever pitch as their pointless labor becomes a struggle for power and survival. Some of the better stories here recount earlier incidents in this Florida cracker family album. "Cousins" features narrator Nim and Jim's adolescent competition for a pretty cousin, and the quietly sad "Floridita" evokes a unique mood and tone as the children listen to their father's tape-recorded letters from Vietnam, even as they know their mother is leaving him for Lloyd. Elsewhere, Tester's successful experiments in everyday dread include the linked stories of a night on the town for aimless New York singles ("Where the Dark Ended") and an existentially difficult stint at the office ("Bad Day"). Sometimes, though, stories like "The Living and the Dead," featuring a college dropout's hitchhiking and hustling tour of Italy, have the air of retrograde minimalism, with the hallmark of an affectless and slightly inarticulate mind game. Yet, overall, this work from Head, who won the 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, shows a strong new talent on the rise. The book's bizarre cover, depicting a man with a hat made from a plastic jug, may please or repel browsers in equal measure, but it will get their attention. Agent, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Most of the stories in this collection, which won the 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, have appeared separately in such wellknown journals as
Esquire,
Fiction, and
StoryQuarterly. Together, they form something of a story cycle, focusing on a farm-boy's childhood and young adulthood in rural Florida and later New York City. Particularly evident here are a clipped, figurative language and the narrator's emotional surges of fear and a desire for intimate knowledge. In "Wet," he and his brother have been taken by their overbearing stepfather, Lloyd, to lay fence around a swamp in the midst of a coming thunderstorm, their rising fear straining to assert itself: "Okay now, Lloyd, it is lightening us." In "Where the Dark Ended," after being too timid to pursue a woman who "went in me, way up inside of my mind," he is, while drugged up, suddenly drawn by the Statue of Liberty. "I had to go up inside her. It was clear to me. I had to climb up inside that idea," which is a sequence that ultimately compels him to something more "real."
James O'LaughlinCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
