Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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Con ese humor negro tan descarnado, con esa sensibilidad para captar la esencia de la desesperación de sus personajes, lo que consigue el autor es, al tiempo que destapa sus flaquezas y sus miedos, subrayar su belleza brutal y primigenia. Since childhood, he’s had a tense relationship with his brother, Stephen, but after six strong drinks, “our knotty history unkinks itself into a sad and simple thing. Then suddenly, thanks to the near-universal freak-out over the brilliance of his first short-story collection (the first printing of which sold out within two weeks of its release) and numerous print profiles, two of which appeared in the New York Times, everybody knew the basics: his pedigree (MFA, Columbia University), his age (35), his hometown (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) his residence (Greenpoint, Brooklyn, third-floor walkup). I dare because there are only a few times in life when the hairs on one's neck stand up and the palms of one's hands moisten when someone not right there *feels* like they are. Again, I've been reading a lot of short fiction and the truth is that while there are some great stories out there, it's almost impossible for me to make it through an entire collection by one author.

From there, the fjord shone like poured silver, and sometimes you could spot a seal poking his head up through the waves. Because all the stories here (except one) are cut from the crazy cultural layercake that is contemporary America, the extraordinarily ordinary scenes of bad romances, sudden fights, pleasure and boredom, difficult brothers, ex-wives, stepfathers, tv, a little too much to drink, a little bit of dope, sexy cousins, places you really wouldn’t want to be, and of course places you really would like to be, for a week or two at least. He chopped and chopped, and when he’d chopped all they had, he started chopping the chopped-up ones over again. The tragedies inflicted on the people of East Africa as a result of European rivalries are belittled and forgotten. They aren't mad because you hurt their feelings, they're mad because you found them in the first place and THEN hurt them.The last short story in the book is the only one that shows any originality but it's only about as good as an honors high school English class assignment (and not one of those "you have two weeks to complete it" assignments, but one of those "it's Tuesday and I want this handed in by Thursday" assignments). The thesis of course being the wildly imaginative and very fresh "maybe all the destruction I have wrought is a bad thing, and will come back to bite me in the ass.

Our hands were stiff and raw from the row over, and we paused at a well in the center of the village to wet our palms and have a drink. his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange. When the porridge was cooked, Mary threw in a few handfuls of onion and took the concoction over to Haakon. S]till you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home. by my count, there are three abused children (nothing graphic at all) and more children, some in flashback, whose childhood seems pretty blown; a number of youngish-to-middle-aged guys who have been taken by the currents of life to places they didn't really want to go, with no idea about what to do now that they are there; and a lot of non-protagonist characters with distinctly unhappy or unappealing lives.

And I think that most of the ill that happens in the world happens despite our best notions of ourselves. A lizard, a "Florida anole, cocked on the shoulder of the propane tank beside the service window, slips down the tank's enamel face into a crescent of deep rust.

Simultaneously, his fiction gained traction, culminating in last year’s New Yorker publication of the story “Leopard. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Like, a lot of the times with his other stuff you're aware going in that it's all gonna be zany bizarro, but just being surprised doesn't provide that same immense thrill if you understand that that's what's scheduled to happen.Life is unlike the books of Orson Scott Card or Mercedes Lackey, where we are told in detail exactly how someone arrives at a decision (through pages of thoughts in italics in Lackey's case, sigh). Still, a strange choice, even considering the fact that such a title becomes emblematic of a basic kind of desperation and loss tucked deep within the characters of this collection.