Driving the Heart: And Other Stories - Softcover

Brown, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393332063 ISBN 13: 9780393332063

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

A stunningly elegant and highly original debut collection of stories at once dark and poignant, funny and bleak.

The story "Thief" begins: "When my mother removed her shirt in front of third-period honors English, I was in the classroom next door taking a test." Her reason --her students were reading The Awakening and she had stopped taking her medication. The battle against self-destruction, the struggle to transform loss into meaning, and the difficulty of connecting with others, especially those closest to our hearts, are part of what make up these beautifully crafted and, in turns, incisively humorous and deeply wrenching stories. In the title story, a man who transports organs for transplants breaks in a trainee and ruminates on his sometimes futile life-and-death existence. In "Dog Lover," a son has a quiet but smoldering battle of wills with his blind Vietnam-vet father over the fate of their dying dog. In "Sadness of the Body," an adolescent boy spends a deliriously hot summer with his alcoholic uncle and the uncle's young girlfriend, and observes the sometimes surreal schism between the body and the mind. Brown plumbs the hearts and minds of characters trying to make sense of their lives. He is a new and exquisitely talented voice in American fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Jason Brown now teaches as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

From Kirkus Reviews

A debut collection of 13 stories, most of them portraying the unhappy domestic life of contemporary Americans. Brown seems to have set out to reverse Tolstoys famous dictum by offering us a group of unhappy families that appear remarkably similar, at least from the outside. Mad or terminally ill mothers predominate, as do drug-addicted children going through detox, and Vietnam vets who never quite pulled themselves together. Thief is a young mans recollections of his adolescence, during which he responded to the trauma of a mothers mental illness through kleptomaniaeven going so far as to steal presents in order to impress girls. Animal Stories is also a sons account, this one being the reminiscence of his mothers death of a brain tumor in the summer of 1972. In Dog Lover, a heroin addict and his blind Vietnam vet fatherboth haunted by the death of the mother and wife who killed herself years agoargue religion and live unhappily together amid a litter of puppies being raised by the son. Detox portrays life inside a county detoxification center where one of the inmates plots an escape. The Coroners Report describes the daily routines of a county coroner as he trains a new employee in the art of informing survivors of the deaths of their loved ones, while the title piece relates the experiences of an ambulance driver who delivers human organs to hospitals in time (he hopes) for successful transplant operations. The Sadness of the Body proceeds in a somewhat more postmodern vein, examining in mock-medical terminology (The spleen suffers from terminally low self- esteem. It refuses to talk to the rest of the body) the physiology of an alcoholic Vietnam vet who, back in 1968, was in charge of the body count. New wine that needs aging: overwritten, ponderous, and crammed with the sorts of platitudes (It seems that what we know makes us sad and what we dont know is who we are) that only undergraduates could find profound. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393332063
• ISBN 13: 9780393332063
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236