Book Review: The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer

Reviewed by David Abrams

For the moment, let’s set aside the fact vs. fiction argument raging on either side of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and face up to one simple fact: this is one damned good book. Some folks have even called it a “masterpiece.” I’m not about to talk anyone out of the “M” word.

If you’re one of those who insists on arranging books according to fiction and non-fiction, then you’d better shelve Mailer’s “true-life novel” somewhere in the middle. Using a novelist’s technique of fabricated dialogue and compressed events, Mailer writes with such force and energy that it fully deserves its trophy-case of literary prizes, including the Pulitzer.

Mailer (who first burst onto the scene with The Naked and the Dead in 1948) has always rankled both critics and readers with his sprawling literature. Some readers lose patience with his wordy prose; some critics say he’s just plain bombastic. I say he’s just plain good.

By the time you make it to the end of The Executioner’s Song, you’ll either hate him or love him—Mailer does not allow any namby-pamby in-between. I’ve read The Executioner’s Song twice—the first time in 1981, two years after its publication and four years after Gary Mark Gilmore’s death by Utah firing squad; the second time was at the turn of our century. The interval of nearly two decades did little to dim my enthusiasm for this book (which I prefer to classify as “embellished journalism”).
 

Gary Gilmore (via)

 

When Gilmore was arrested, tried and convicted of killing two Mormon men in Provo, Utah, one hot July night in 1976, I was living about 500 miles away. Up in Wyoming, I followed the whole murder case on the evening news. Back then, the viciousness of Gilmore’s crime (shooting decent Americans in the head with little provocation) was big news. Our society had yet to see the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Night Stalker, Columbine High School, or whatever sad shooting you’ll find in the headlines tomorrow. Gilmore, with his movie-star good looks and piercing gaze, was the Monster Next Door.

 

After his conviction, things really took a turn for the bizarre. Gilmore was given the death penalty.  Rather than fight with a series of appeals and pleas for gubernatorial pardons, Gilmore told the state he wanted to die. Never before had someone pursued his own death sentence. The media swooped in on the penitentiary and the rest of the world held its breath to see if Gilmore would eventually change his mind. He didn’t. And that’s partly what makes this book so fascinating: the character (if a real person can be called a “character”) of Gary Mark Gilmore. He is, in fact, so complex that even a tough-guy writer like Norman Mailer has difficulty getting inside his heart and head to find out what made the Monster Next Door tick.  (Unlike Truman Capote who burrowed deep—some say too deep—into his In Cold Blood killers.)

 

But Mailer gives it his best shot and the result is a big, whopping book composed of bite-sized vignettes—most of them only a paragraph long—making the pages fly past at the speed of cinema.  The book tracks the lives of Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, his Mormon relatives, his victims and the media circus that set up camp outside the state penitentiary. The Executioner’s Song is divided into two parts: "Western Voices" (the crimes and the trial) and "Eastern Voices" (the deathwatch and execution). Of the two, the first is much more fascinating and suspenseful—a result, probably, of our morbid fascination with all things bloody and twisted. Some of the second half is tedious, especially the long stretches with Lawrence Schiller, pseudo-journalist and self-promoter who is the only writer allowed to share Gilmore’s last moments (Mailer cut a deal with Schiller to use his notes and tape recordings for this book). Still, I was actually moved by Gilmore’s final walk toward the firing-squad chamber. By that point, he almost had my sympathy.

 

“The book is huge in both size and scope, but Mailer always finds the right words to describe even the smallest of events.”

 

The book is huge in both size and scope, but Mailer always finds the right words to describe even the smallest of events. Here, for instance, is the moment the entire book has been leading to—the execution by firing squad:

 

When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn’t quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down as if to say, “That did it, gentlemen.” Schiller thought the movement was as delicate as the fingers of a pianist raising his hand before he puts it down on the keys.

I have just one word for a passage like that: Wow.  Okay, maybe one other word:  Masterpiece.

Reviewer David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesy Lisa Wareham Photography.)

Buy Fobbit at IndieBound or at Amazon.

Book Review: Five Skies, by Ron Carlson

Reviewed by David Abrams

Three men stand at the edge of a remote river gorge in Idaho, about to begin work on a summer construction project: a large wooden ramp at the lip of the canyon, built for a motorcycle stuntwoman who plans to jump the canyon, a la Evel Knievel.  The three men are relative strangers to each other, but before the summer is over, they will bond in ways none of them could have predicted.

That's the sum total of Ron Carlson's first novel in thirty years, Five Skies.  It's a beautiful, patiently moving narrative about the value of hard work and the way flawed men come to grips with their personal demons.  Each of these three men are running from something: the gigantic man-of-few-words Arthur Key, who used to build collapsible sets for movies and who can't shake feelings of guilt over a recent death; Darwin Gallegos, the former ranch-hand at Rio Difficulto, where the men are building the ramp, and who won't let go of the pain of his wife's death in a plane crash five months earlier; and Ronnie Panelli, a nineteen-year-old petty thief who is trying to mend the error of his ways.

The men are each, in their own stoic way, trying to heal themselves by plunging into a summer of hard labor.  Arthur, for instances, reveals this to us early in the novel:  He told himself he was trying to regroup, to get a grip, but he now knew, after this time away from the life he had ruined, he wasn't doing a very good job of it.  The bulk of the novel demonstrates how three tough but sensitive men go about untying the knots that bind them to past sorrows and mistakes.

Amid the hairy navel-gazing, the methodical work of engineering goes on unabated.  Save for a few trips into the nearby town of (aptly named) Mercy, the action is confined to the job site on the wind-swept plateau.  Even here, Carlson finds poetry in the muscular world of construction, filling Five Skies with precise details of the labor and materials involved in building a structure that will, in essence, be a one-shot wonder.  Here, for instance, is one paragraph planted early in the book when Arthur goes shopping at the local hardware store:

He had a list in his pocket and he began assembling the items:  wooden stakes; heavy twine; steel hinges; two hundred yards of the rope; a one-inch tempered steel drill bit; forty-yard-long dowels, diameter one inch; a basket of steel fittings; boxes of wood screws; bags of brads; a roof stapler and staples; five gallons of wood sealer; five gallons of white enamel; spray enamel, white, black red; coarse-bristle paintbrushes; four paint rollers with extension handles; ten bags of posthole mix; five gallons of creosote; and a shopping cart of miscellaneous small tools, including chisels, a rasp and a fine Stanley wood plane.

 

The novel is a literary blueprint of work, the diary of one summer of sweat and sore muscles.  The men carefully clear brush from the site, dig post-holes, hammer sheets of lumber together, and smooth asphalt for the runway.  They are proud of their work but are always reminded that it's just a job and that soon the summer will end and they will drift away from the site and, most likely, from each other.  There is one particularly telling scene when they travel to the other side of the canyon and look back on the half-built ramp:

Key was sobered by the panorama, and the vastness smothered his notions that the project might succeed.  It was one thing, and a good thing, to secure a rail or build a step, but under the pressing sky and against this thousand-mile wind, and across the red and violet vacuum of the rocky chasm, every nail they'd pounded seemed a waste of time.  The three men stood in the soft sand near the lip of rock in their sunglasses and looked across at this little jobsite.

“Amid the hairy navel-gazing, the methodical work of engineering goes on unabated.” 

 

The physical labor may take center stage, but it's the personal growth of each character we're most interested in.  Carlson unfolds those revelations little by little, not playing his whole hand all at once.

These characters, these men, are kind and patient with each other—something you don't typically find in the predominantly cynical fiction of today.  This is wholly refreshing to read and lends Five Skies a sweet but melancholy air that lingers even after you've set the book down and gone about the rest of your day's business.  Arthur, Darwin, and Ronnie are guaranteed to stay with you for a long time, that's how magnificent a job Carlson has done in creating these three men.

The wind-swept plains of Idaho will also be burned into your imagination.  There are beautiful, compelling scenes—especially one in which the men descend into the canyon on a fishing trip—that have the power to take your breath away.  Here is a passage that's typical of the way in which the land resonates into the story:

They had woken to the sky a perfect trick, a magnified color well beyond cobalt.  Tangible and tender, the air and the earth after the rain seemed minted, some rare promise in the leverage of the early sunshine.  Rags of mist stood twisting in the atmosphere.

 

Those sentences also point to one of the novel's minor flaws: a complicated syntax that often calls attention to itself and reminds us that a writer is at work, sweating over these sentences as he pounds them into place.  Those moments are few and far between, however, and Five Skies succeeds best when Carlson relaxes and lets the story proceed transparently and without interference.

Carlson uses metaphor subtly and effectively, knowing just when to slip in an image that will echo beyond itself.  Arthur, for instance, is initially disappointed that the project is a motorcycle stunt ramp and he tells Darwin, “I was really hoping this would be a bridge.  That would have been more than I could chew, but I was hoping.”

The whole book, really, is about three men searching for ways to span the emotional chasms that have, in various ways, isolated them from the rest of society.  Here, in the high Idaho plateau country, they will do their best to overcome past mistakes; some will succeed, others will be cut short by new tragedies, but the point is that they're trying.  They are men at work on their souls and it's a testament to Carlson's talent that he's able to make this inner journey as exciting to watch as any high-octane testosterone action movie.

This review was originally published in January Magazine.

Reviewer David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesy Lisa Wareham Photography.)

Buy Fobbit at IndieBound or at Amazon.

Book Review: The New Mexico Trilogy of Rick Collignon

by Dan Wickett

 

The Journal of Antonio Montoya

 

Originally published by MacMurray & Beck, paperback currently in print via Unbridled Books

This extremely well-packaged debut novel by Rick Collignon announces the arrival of a fantastic writer who should be watched closely in the future. MacMurray & Beck found another winner with Collignon and his tale of the town of Guadalupe, New Mexico.

The book is slight, probably 4 x 6 inches and just over 200 pages long to boot, but the story is huge. It is the story of family, and how history can be used to remind us of how to live our lives today.

Collignon focuses on the Montoya family in The Journal of Antonio Montoya.  The tale begins when little Jose Montoya loses his father and mother to an automobile accident with a cow one August morning.  At the funeral, his mother sits up in her casket and tells his Aunt Ramona that she would prefer that Ramona take care of little Jose, rather than his Uncle Flavio and his wife Martha.

Ramona reacts to this event by telling Flavio her intentions to take and raise Jose for her deceased brother and sister-in-law.  She takes Jose through town and to her house, where she encounters her grandfather Epolito Montoya—who has been dead for some thirteen years at the time.  Getting past him at the door allows her to run into her deceased grandmother who offers her food.  It really isn't until little Jose follows his grandfather out to irrigate the fields that the reader sees that Ramona is not just hallucinating and that the dead have returned to the scenes of the living.

The amazing thing about Collignon's story-telling abilities is that once the reader realizes that everybody is seeing the dead, the idea no longer seems preposterous at all, and the presence of any of them just flows along with all of the other plotlines.

Ramona had left the little town of Guadalupe, going to a bigger city and trying to make her way as an artist, a painter. She never truly felt like she fit in with her parents or two brothers.  It wasn't until some time after she returned that she found her muse as an artist—the town of Guadalupe itself.  She began to paint the town, piece by piece, including a haunting scene of the cemetery engulfed in flames.

Jose's Uncle Flavio comes by, partially with the plan of taking Jose back home to Martha—the two of them had not been able to have the children they had always talked about raising, even with many years of unfettered lovemaking.  It isn't until he encounters his grandparents that he even gets an inkling of why Ramona has taken the task of raising Jose upon herself.  He ends up getting Martha to come over—she and Rose had always gotten along very well—and going out to irrigate the field with Epolito and Jose.

Rose will have nothing to do with allowing Ramona to help out around the house.  She instead gives her an old musty book to read—The Journal of Antonio Montoya.  In it, Ramona reads the history of the town of Guadalupe from back when her distant relative Antonio was a Santero—one who carved religious icons out of wood for others to put in their homes.

It is through the history of Antonio and the town of Guadalupe back in his day that Ramona pieces together how family interacts, how some things that shouldn't, go unsaid, and vice versa.  It is through the reading of this history that she learns about herself, why she acts and reacts the way she does.  What the history is capable of doing is making Ramona realize that she has a purpose, and that she is not lost in life.

The book is a powerful little tale and extremely well written.  Collignon has a style that makes the words dance along the page.  It is not due to action, not verbosity—it is just the style he employs that makes the words such a treat to read along.  This debut is not to be missed.

 

 

Perdido

Originally published by MacMurray & Beck, paperback currently in print via Unbridled Books

In Perdido, Collignon returns to his fictional town of Guadalupe, New Mexico. While the Montoyas are present again, they do not dominate the second novel like they did the first.

Collignon instead concentrates on Will Sawyer and the folks that he associates with, specifically his business partner Felipe and Will's girlfriend Lisa. Will has landed in Guadalupe through some sort of fate—he ran out of gas one day and walked into town, finding an old abandoned house to take over.

Will and Felipe do construction work together.  Felipe is married with a few children while Will is single. Will's girlfriend Lisa works as a waitress and lives in a trailer at the back edge of her mother's homestead.  Her hotheaded brother lives with her mother still and is none too happy that she has taken up with Will, a non-Latino.

While they are going to another larger town for supplies one day, Felipe mentions to Will that one day a young girl was found to have committed suicide by hanging herself on the bridge they were about to cross.  The story interests Will and he wants to know more, so Felipe tells him to talk to an elderly gentleman who was around at the time.  After talking to him, Will learns that a specific police officer was in charge of the investigation, and he was still around.  His name was Ray.

As soon as Will brings up the subject, Ray gets very defensive and angry and threatening.  Will apologizes, not understanding how asking a simple question has caused this amount of anger, and leaves.  Later that night, he is awakened as his house is lit by headlights.  It is the car of Ray's nephew.  As he and his buddies make a lot of commotion and drink, Will gets angry and determines he wants to find out more about the girl now.

The further he looks into the story, the angrier the people in town get with him.  Collignon does a great job of allowing the reader to feel Will's frustration in the matter by not getting into the heads of the townsfolk.  Instead, one is left with Will's thought process and is as confused as he is about the anger being projected on him.

Collignon uses the people of Guadalupe well in this novel to look at the feeling of displacement within a community.  Will is never made to feel like he's one of the community, and the incidents following his simple line of questioning don't do anything to help out in that matter.

As he finds out more about the history of the incident, he really never finds out the truth.

Collignon shows his confidence in his storytelling with the fact that the incident that the main story revolves around—the death of the girl—is not only an historical event, and it is never cleared up or explained; it just dangles there throughout the story.

Collignon is correct in his confidence however—the explanation is not needed nor missed.  As in his debut effort, the writing is fantastic and further develops the dancing usage of the English language established last time around.  The only thing missing is more involvement of the Montoyas—Collignon did such a great job establishing their identities in his first Guadalupe novel that it seems they should be a great part of any story told there.

 

 

A Santo in the Image of Cristobal Garcia

Originally published by BlueHen Books, paperback currently in print via Unbridled Books

Collignon once again returns to his fictional town of Guadalupe, New Mexico, with what appears to be a final visit.  This time the Montoyas are the dominant family in the story being told, just as in his Collignon's first effort. 

This novel gives Collignon's readers a more thorough version of the history of Guadalupe as a large portion of the book involves Flavio Montoya, relating as he and his friend Felix used to listen to the last of the Garcia family recall the events of the three founders of the small town.  The story is a fascinating one that readers will be more than content to hear Collignon's version as opposed to my recap of it.

Collignon also gives his readers what appears to be the end of the town's history as the entire town is engulfed in flames through much of the novel.  There is some confusion over how the fire was started as Collignon continues a trait from his past novels of jumping into a story after the initialization of an event and not actually having that storyline complete before the end of the book.

He also brings back an element from his first novel—that of the unreliable character.   Where the reader was fully aware that characters that were dead were very active in The Journal of Antonio Montoya, in this effort we are treated to Flavio's dreaming and the fact that Felix is walking around, even though he had a debilitating stroke within the last decade. Another old friend of Flavio and Felix wanders towards the fire with only a shovel and is consumed by the flames only to reappear at Flavio's sister Ramona's house later on.

Collignon also returns to review his issues with the feeling of displacement within a community.  The non-Latino Officer Oliver is virtually ignored by the townspeople while he is trying to determine the cause of the fire and help get folks out to safety.  In each of the three efforts, Collignon has looked at this issue in a different manner, keeping it fresh.

Collignon is hitting on all cylinders with this effort—the writing is fantastic and further develops the dancing usage of the English language established in his first two novels.  In bringing back the Montoya family, he eliminates the only slight complaint a reader might have had with Perdido, and in telling the full history from beginning to end of Guadalupe, he gives his readers everything they could ask for this time.  As they were overlooked when they came out, try to find the first two novels first—this one works by itself, but it would be a shame to not enjoy the town as it was meant to be.

 

(All three reviews originally written in 2002 and distributed via email from the Emerging Writers Network.)

 

 

Dan Wickett founded the Emerging Writers Network in 2000 and co-founded Dzanc Books in 2006 with Steven Gillis. He edited the short story anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53) and has published a short story in Quick Fiction.
Buy Visiting Hours

 

 

Book Review: Rising from the Plains, by John McPhee

Reviewed by David Abrams

I never became a geologist for the simple reason that my mother embarrassed the hell out of me in 10th grade.  On one particular day, she shamed me so thoroughly that the mechanism that produces the blush reaction in my neurological system overheated to such a degree it broke.  And it was all because I was failing Geology.  To this day, you only have to say the word “rock” and I turn beet-red.  This becomes particularly troublesome when people around me start talking about rock-and-roll.

At any rate, there I was back in 10th grade, blissfully minding my own business in Mr. Rudd’s fifth-period Geology class.  He was mid-lecture when there came a sharp rap on the door and, without waiting for an invitation, my mother poked her head in the door.  She looked at Mr. Rudd and said, “Can I speak to you for a moment?”  At the time, she worked as a secretary in the Main Office and was always poking her head into my classrooms willy-nilly.  [Psychological footnote: the trauma of having your parent work in your school during the Acne Years can cause some serious permanent damage that can only be antidoted with heavy drinking and the occasional Prozac prescription.  Don’t ask me how I know.]

I sat there in Geology class, my blush mechanism already firing on all pistons.  Necks craned, heads swiveled in my direction, silence filled the air.  You could have heard a pebble drop.

The next head to pop back into the classroom belonged to Mr. Rudd.  He had a head that was elfin in nature—I always thought he looked like Yoda with smaller ears and darker hair, not a pretty sight under any circumstances.  He crooked his finger at me and I rose from my seat to walk, jelly-legged, out to the hall.  There, I joined the impromptu fifth-period Parent-Teacher conference already in progress.  I knew what was going on: my mother had, in the course of her secretarial duties, seen my latest progress reports.

Out there in the hallway, my mother’s face was working through measurable stages of anger and disappointment.  She was rendered speechless, so Mr. Rudd did all of the talking.  “Your mother is concerned,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s worried about the grade you’re getting my class this quarter.  Right now, it’s an F.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She feels you can do better.  And so do I.  You can do better, can’t you?”

“At that point, I wished, somewhat appropriately, for our town to be struck by an earthquake or, at the very least, be buried in a mudslide.”

I nodded.  Words were beyond me, having lodged in the middle of my throat where they refused to budge.  At that point, I wished, somewhat appropriately, for our town to be struck by an earthquake or, at the very least, be buried in a mudslide.  I looked at my mother, putting as much sorrow and regret in my eyes as I could.  How I wished I could lie to her and tell her that I loved rocks.

Mr. Rudd cleared his throat and, in a very discreet, solemn Yoda-like manner, retreated to his classroom and picked up where he left off with his lecture: “Earthquakes Aren’t Anyone’s Fault.”

Despite her fury and anguish, my mother finally broke down and gave me a hug there in the middle of the hallway of my high school and, even though my blush-o-meter was completely broken at this point, it did feel good.  Right there and then, I resolved to do better in Mr. Rudd’s class, and when the next report card was issued, damned if I didn’t do better.  I got a D.

I tell you this story by way of a long introduction to John McPhee’s masterful Rising From the Plains to make a point: even the biggest dunderhead with an aversion to all things geologic can sit down to read a book with the words “feldspar,” “Eocene” and “upthrust” without feeling the urge to throw up.

In the moments after I returned to class, my mother went back to the Main Office, and the surface of my scalp started to cool, I would never ever have imagined I’d be sitting here, nearly four decades later, typing these words: Geology is fun.  Or, if it’s not entirely “fun,” then it’s certainly a thing of beauty in the hands of Mr. McPhee.

Rising From the Plains, which renders the formation of the Wyoming landscape into something resembling poetry, was first published in 1986 and forms part of a series of books McPhee wrote about rocks ’n stuff: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Each of those chapters of geologic history—in which McPhee tags along with geologists from Brooklyn to San Francisco—has been assembled into one volume (along with an extra chapter, “Crossing the Craton”) called Annals of the Former World.  This 700-page book, as heavy and beautiful as a chunk of quartz, justly won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1999.  Rather than spend a lot of words on Annals of the Former World, I’ll just say this: if you are in the least bit interested in McPhee’s prose or if the very mention of the word “sediment” provokes an orgasmic spasm in your nether-regions, then by all means buy it.  Money spent on McPhee is never wasted.

But now, let’s examine just one layer of that geologic timetable: Rising From the Plains…

Here’s what we’re greeted with on the very first page:

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist.  I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.  She arrived in the autumn of 1905, when she was twenty-three.  Her hair was so blond it looked white.

Reading those sentences, I was immediately hooked and pulled into the rest of the book.  It’s like putting one tentative foot into the edge of a swift river and having the force of the current suck you into the middle of the stream before you can even catch your breath.

“Reading those sentences, I was immediately hooked and pulled into the rest of the book. It’s like putting one tentative foot into the edge of a swift river and having the force of the current suck you into the middle of the stream before you can even catch your breath.”

McPhee’s style is sinuous, detailed and, yes, as irresistible as a river current.  In this and other books (like his Alaska-adventure classic Coming into the Country), he is always just one inch shy of fiction (at least in terms of style).  Sure, he’s discussing geology, but it’s never ever dry as dust (Mr. Rudd, are you listening?).  And so, we get gorgeous, instructive sentences like these:

It was a shale so black it all but smelled of low tide.  In it, like mica, were millions of fish scales.  It was interlayered with bentonite, which is a rock so soft it is actually plastic—pliable and porous, color of cream, sometimes the color of chocolate.

Or these:

In the Bronco, we moved through the snow toward the mountains, crossing the last of the Great Plains, which had been shaped like ocean swells by eastbound streams.  Now and again, a pump jack was visible near the road, sucking up oil from deep Cretaceous sand, bobbing solemnly at its task—a giant grasshopper absorbed in its devotions.

At the wheel of that Bronco is David Love, of the U.S. Geological Survey and then-supervisor of the Survey’s environmental branch in Laramie, Wyoming.  Like any journalist worth his weight in ink, McPhee managed to track down the most interesting character to guide him through his geologic journey across Wyoming.  Known as the “grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology” by his colleagues, Love was born “in the center of Wyoming in 1913” and knew every inch of the land like the back of his gnarled hand.

McPhee has a keen, observant eye and he has a remarkable ability to make the ordinary extraordinary.  Here, for instance, is how he describes Love when we meet him on page 5:

The grand old man had a full thatch of white hair, and crow’s feet around pale-blue eyes.  He wore old gray boots with broken laces, brown canvas trousers, and a jacket made of horsehide.  Between his hips was a brass belt buckle of the sort that suggests a conveyor.  Ambiguously, it was scrolled with the word “LOVE.”  On his head was a two-gallon Stetson, with a braided-horsehair band.  He wore trifocals.  There was stratigraphy even in his glasses.

Notice how subtly McPhee turns man into landscape in that last sentence.  Throughout the book, the author has the knack for sidling up to his subject, appearing to look at it from the corner of his eye.  With a casual flick of his wrist, he turns geology into something profound.

Most of the book consists of McPhee’s days spent with Love as they bounce around Wyoming’s sage-covered bluffs in the Bronco.  Every so often, McPhee includes passages from a diary, written by Love’s mother—as it turns out, the white-blond lady stepping off the train in 1905 Rawlins.  (It also turns out that Love’s great-uncle was John Muir.)  McPhee layers the two narratives—personal history and geologic history—like the overlapping plates of the earth’s crust.  It is masterful, confident writing and it never once loses our rapt attention (unlike certain 10th-grade teachers I’ve known … ahem).

At this point, I must confess a personal bias toward Rising From the Plains: I am a child of Wyoming, having spent eleven years of my youth in the state.  Deep affection for the state runs like granite strata through my body and so my eyes were already a bit tainted before they landed on the pages of McPhee’s book.

Jenny Lake, Grand Teton National Park (via)

And yet, he writes of Wyoming’s landscape in a way that makes it completely new and, incredibly, as thrilling as the latest John Grisham bestseller (“incredibly,” since we are, after all, talking about a pile of rocks).  For instance, I must have boated across Grand Teton National Park’s Jenny Lake at least four dozen times in my life.  But then I read this paragraph and a shiver trickles down my spine:

In the Teton landscape are forms of motion that would not be apparent in a motion picture.  Features of the valley are cryptic, paradoxical, and bizarre.  In 1983, divers went down into Jenny Lake, at the base of the Grand Teton, and reported a pair of Engelmann spruce, rooted in the lake bottom, standing upright, enclosed in eighty feet of water.

You could have told me that my mother was Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter and I would not have been more surprised by the revelation.  This is just one small way in which McPhee—here and in all of his books—opens our eyes to the natural world around us, that fragile-crusted globe we take for granted and daily plow, pave and burden with our footsteps.  Or, as Love himself says, “If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature.  You live with it.  And you make the accommodations—because nature does not accommodate.”

I tell you about my personal connection to Rising From the Plains because, wouldn’t you know, the geology of Wyoming was exactly what I was supposed to be studying in that fifth-period class 24 years ago.  Back then, the landscape was nothing but a mind-numbing blur of stone and dust.  I can only imagine what I might have become if I’d had Mr. McPhee as my guide.  Perhaps today I would be out there somewhere walking along a riverbed and stopping, every now and then, to chip away at the hard beauty of the earth.

Buy Rising from the Plains at IndieBound or at Amazon

This review was originally published on Epinions.

Reviewer David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesy Lisa Wareham Photography.)

Fobbit will be out September 4. Pre-order it at IndieBound or at Amazon.

Book Review: Volt, by Alan Heathcock

Reviewed by David Abrams

The title of Alan Heathcock’s debut collection of short stories practically begs for allusions to electricity, but the fact of the matter is, Volt really does energize and jolt the reader from the very first paragraph to the final lines, which linger, sparking and buzzing, long after the last page is turned.

Heathcock worked ten years on these stories and the hard, lonely hours of the solitary writer at his keyboard have paid off as readers now hold one of the year’s best short story collections in their hands.  Volt makes us think, makes us feel, and makes us believe in the power of short fiction once again.

In a tradition stretching from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Heathcock links the stories in Volt through location and character—the residents of the fictional Krafton.  They are set in an indefinable place and time.  It could be Indiana in the 1950s or it could be Montana in the 2010s, but the characters are, at heart, those folks who live next door to us; or, more precisely, those who live in the mirror.  Heathcock has gone directly to the heart of what makes us tick and breathe in a world thrown into disarray, no matter if it’s the Cold War or the Iraq War in the background.

With a certain Midwestern stoicism, most of Heathcock’s characters are men and women of few words.  In the collection’s opening story, “The Staying Freight,” Winslow Nettles embarks on a weeks-long cross-country odyssey after he accidentally kills his boy and causes a train derailment.  Before he departs, however, he leaves a note on the kitchen table for his wife: Took a walk.  Be back soon.

In fact, Winslow will not be back anytime soon.  He has set off on a sojourn across a rough landscape and, metaphorically, across an equally scarred soul.  The circumstances for his prolonged descent into a personal hell of his own choice is the kind of punishing, self-imposed exile typical to many of the characters in Volt.  Heathcock’s men and women feel they aren’t worthy—not in the eyes of their Creator, nor even in the judgment of their friends and neighbors in Krafton.  Sin, guilt, regret, redemption, forgiveness, and mercy wrestle like naked, greased angels of God in these pages.

At one point in “The Staying Freight” Winslow contends not with an angel, but with “a scraggly pine rising from the rock” he finds on his trip across the countryside while fleeing from the guilt over his son’s death:

Winslow hurled stones at the little tree.  Wrung its trunk as if it were a throat.  He flailed and throttled the sapling to the ground.  Winslow hugged its limbs and tried to weep, but was, at last, dry of tears.  Under a pale moon, Winslow knew he no longer belonged to the world of men and would forever roam the woods as a lost son of the civil.

That last sentence in particular is a good example of the heightened language that Heathcock wields like a heavy, sharp sword throughout Volt.  Equal parts Old Testament and Cormac McCarthy, these sweeping, severe pronouncements rise up and smite us in the eyes.  Though they sometimes jar us out of the book by their sheer audacity, they nonetheless work in the overall context of all the stories in the collection.  I mean, you’ve gotta admit it takes a ballsy writer to deliver a sentence like this in describing a father at the limit of his mourning for a dead son: “Then there were no more words, and the anchor whose ship was battered by a yearlong storm broke free from the reef of Vernon’s heart.”  In lesser hands, a sentence like that would make us roll our eyes.  Coming from Heathcock out of the emotional core of his already-amped-up prose, it adds rather than detracts to the centrifugal force of the stories.

Heathcock writes not just from a Biblical lineage, but he comes to us by way of the magical realists as well.  In “The Staying Freight,” after his jaw is shattered in a fight, the grieving Winslow (a name that could be parsed as “Wins Low” or “Win Slow”) becomes even more stoic, scribbling words on a notepad and allowing himself to be turned into a sideshow freak with rock-hard muscles that crumple all boxing opponents.  Winslow’s shell of sorrow is so hard that punches thrown at him end in splintered bone.  Underneath that granite exterior, however, is a man who feels terrible about the chain of events he’s set in motion.  “Just can’t move away from myself,” he laments.  The punches are his penance as he turns into “a lockjawed, feral-haired savage.”

Lest you think “The Staying Freight” ends in miserable emotional squalor, let me just say—without giving too much away—there is redemption and the first steps toward forgiveness at the climax of the story.  There is also one of the purest expressions of love from a man who can’t form the right words for his wife: “I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said.  “Just for a moment.  Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.”

Winslow is not alone in his struggles.  In the course of this book, a pastor wrestles with guilt over his son’s combat death in Iraq, a father enlists his son’s help in disposing of a man he’s killed when their trucks come to an impasse on a single-lane road, bored and restless teens vandalize a neighboring town with bowling balls, and Sheriff Helen Farraley conceals the discovery of a murdered girl’s body from fellow citizens who, she thinks, would be devastated by the truth.

Sheriff Farraley is at the core of most of Volt's stories—including what I think is destined to be Heathcock's masterpiece: “Peacekeeper,” the brilliantly told account of how she hides the girl's corpse and metes out her own brand of justice to the killer—an act she calls “the Big Peace.”  She's a former grocery-store manager who was nominated to the peacekeeping post on a whim during a town meeting at the First Baptist Church.  When a flood straight out of the Book of Genesis threatens to wash away Krafton, it's Helen who must provide the stable, emotional core of the community, even though she's as spiritually damaged as the rest of them.

Parked on the quarry's service road, the cruiser growing cold with the motor off, Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn't begun that way, was nothing she'd planned, but now she saw that's how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don't want this. I ain't the one to make the world right.

Like everyone else in Krafton, Helen is ripped asunder by a torment in which good and evil are written in billboard-sized letters.

With an Old Testament God looming over Krafton’s horizon like an anvil-shaped cloud, it’s safe to say that Heathcock knowingly ventures into Flannery O’Connor territory (minus the barbed humor).  Everything rises and everything converges in these eight stories that interlace like a darker, meatier Winesburg, Ohio.  Many of Heathcock’s characters are trying to make their way through an uncertain world—one woman literally wanders through a cornfield maze of her own design—and if they haven’t fully reached understanding and redemption by the last sentence, they are at least several steps closer.  Sometimes the epiphanies are as simple as this statement from a pastor’s wife: “No matter what you say, or how much you talk, someone isn’t really forgiven until you can stand beside them without wanting to slap them in the face.”  Flannery herself couldn’t have said it any better.

Here’s another example of a character working through a spiritual tangle:

Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel.  Maybe folks don’t trust in good things no more.  Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive.  Maybe war is God come to life in men.  Vernon pushed on toward the light of day.  He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

That’s from “Smoke,” a story in which young Vernon helps his father burn the body of a man killed when he refused to give way to Vernon’s father on that one-lane road.  “Once things change they don’t never turn back,” the father tells his son, and that aura of inevitability and permanent sin settles like mist over Krafton throughout Volt.

For all the dark clouds, there are moments of breathtaking beauty in the prose, as in these opening sentences from “Fort Apache”:

The electric sign for the Krafton Bowl and Lounge was a vibrant white square atop a tall post.  Set back from the road, the lounge’s roof and all but one wall had collapsed.  Smoldering lumber jutted from charred brick.  Bowling lanes lay exposed to the night, and in the lane oil lapped tiny spectral flames like a riot of hummingbirds.

It takes a bold imagination to summon hummingbirds from the char of a fire.  And Heathcock is nothing if not bold.  Later in that same story, there’s this gem of a passage:

“Sometimes I wish I was in the movies,” [Walt] said.  “Not to be famous or nothing.  I just wish I was made of light.  Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen.  I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.”

When I read sentences like that, I am overwhelmed to such a degree that I have to set the book aside for a moment and walk around the room just to give my brain and my blood enough time to absorb all the perfect things that Heathcock does on the page.

The characters in Volt lead hard lives riven by enough tragedy to fuel a cycle of Shakespeare plays, but Heathcock always leaves enough space for the sun to shine through the cracks of the stories.  Or, in the case of “Lazarus,” through the panes of stained glass as Vernon, now the town's pastor, dispenses spiritual advice to a troubled teen:

Vernon stared up at a window lit in amber, Jesus serving the fish and loaves on a Galilean hillside.  “Every day’s a new batch of crosses,” he finally said.  “All of us taking our turn.”  Vernon watched Dillard until the boy gave him his eyes.  “Christ didn’t just die for our sins, son,” Vernon said.  “Christ taught us how to be crucified.  How to go off into the tomb.  But then, after a while, that rock rolls away and the sun shines in and you get to go live some more.”

When Volt’s characters come out of the tomb, or crawl out of caves that smell of burned corpses, they are washed clean through and through—as are readers when they surface from the depths of these extraordinary stories.

Buy Volt at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, at Rediscovered Bookshop, at Powell's, or at IndieBound.

This review was originally published on the Quivering Pen.

Reviewer David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.  He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq.  He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife.  His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesy Lisa Wareham Photography.)

Fobbit will be out September 4.  Pre-order it at IndieBound or at Amazon.

Thank you, David, for your generosity.  David is our inaugeral contributor and book reviewer, and you can look forward to more great reviews from him in the future.  Stay tuned.