Reviews

Intelligent, sharp, dark with hope, and utterly human. We can all find ourselves in Stanley Jenkins’ piercing words. I loved it.

The stories are tangled with socially and spiritually angst driven characters making their way through some very dark moments. The landscape is teeming with antiheroes and soul searching keening, to try and compare
it I would say it is in the realm of Cormac McCarthy. Dark. Loved it.

The people and stories in this book are haunted by the American past. There are stories from the early 20th Century that I didn’t know about (the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike), ones from the 1930s that I had (the killing of “Pretty Boy” Floyd in 1934), and what seem like more personal narratives from the turn of the 20th Century. But in all of these, the characters (and author) are looking backward, working and pulling on a question I don’t think fiction asks very often: what is America? (It’s not shouted out, but it is definitely there.) So that’s the context for the different lives, and sometimes different writing styles, in these stories.

Several stories use old songs to comment on what’s happening (which I almost always like), among them a song about the sinking of the Titanic used to comment on the arrogance of Capitalists that is itself an example of the haunting American past. A few stories are more impressionistic than narrative, with fragments and repetition making things more like poetry. But others put you right in the middle of things and then accelerate to the tragic (and sometimes horrific) end. “Trees (Illinois Noir)” did that with a lot of b&w style, but not so much style that I didn’t care how it was going to end. And when I did get to the end, I felt I’d been conned just like the private eye in the story, which I think is what great writing can do. The story is a con that you think you can beat, you think you can stay above it and just read it. But then you’re dragged into it and twisted around because the story is just too good.

One of the more explicit explorations of the meaning of America is a meditation on New York City (where I live): “Like a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead yet…. I hate this city like I hate that my father is getting old — like a kite hates the hand that holds the string.” – from “The Republic of Dreams.”

The cumulative effect is heavy, and not leavened by a great deal of hope or redemption, but that’s how things generally are. And the America in them is reminiscent of the movie Badlands and of the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Which is to say: this is a great stuff.