First, Body: Stories - Hardcover

Thon, Melanie Rae

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039578588X ISBN 13: 9780395785881

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1997

Synopsis

The author of Girls in the Grass presents another collection of her short stories, including the tale of a privileged Florida girl who reveals that the secret dangers of her life include alligators and a crippled grandfather.

About this title

About the Author

Melanie Rae Thon teaches at the Ohio State University.

Reviews

Thon (Iona Moon), who made the final cut of Granta's list of the Best Young American Novelists, peoples the seven incandescent stories in her new collection with characters who have nothing more to lose. They are numbly hanging on to life, absorbed by the ache of memories and regrets. Whether they live in Seattle, rural Montana, Boston or Florida, most of them are on the precipice of despair, with no possessions except their bodies, which they destroy with alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. In "Nobody's Daughters," a starved, cold, homeless 14-year-old black girl named Nadine listens to the voice of her dead sister, who both guides her and tempts her to steal. Wearing her victims' clothes enables Nadine to imagine herself into their lives for a while, to try to find the love her mother has withheld. ER worker Sid Elliot, the protagonist of the title story, learned about death in Vietnam; lonely, alcoholic but determined to redeem his dignity, he makes a bad decision and becomes trapped beneath the body of a 326-pound woman in the hospital morgue. Others here also make bad choices and regret them immediately and eternally, but ultimately bad choices are the only ones open to them. The body is a prison for these characters, who long to burst free into new physical entities with different opportunities, different parents, different lovers. Their corporal reality is ironic because they feel faceless, invisible, hollow?forever denied the reviving touch of love. Thon has a dark, fierce imagination expressed in a torrential sweep of words. If cumulatively these tales present a near-surfeit of intense, fevered interior monologues that crest in high-pitched hallucinatory scenes, if the quotient of pervasive angst becomes a bit overpowering, the stories nonetheless leave an indelible impression of heartbreaking truth. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Singing the body electric in her distinctive way, by frying a basic life-as-punishment theme until little but ashes remains, Granta-acclaimed young novelist Thon returns with a second volume of tough, exact, unsparing stories (Girls in the Grass, 1991). Thon's characters either drink or struggle to give it up. The title story follows the hard life of a beefy hospital orderly, a recovering alcoholic, who takes in a hard-bitten, homeless stranger thinking there might be comfort in mutual misery; she soon goes back to the streets, however, while he, demoted from emergency room to morgue, ruins his knee by attempting to treat an even beefier corpse with dignity. Also set in sodden Seattle, ``Bodies of Water'' features a hard-drinking housewife who has her purse snatched, then goes home to weather a storm alone while her husband and rebellious daughter wander the city; the power goes out, which doesn't keep her from finding the booze, after which, fearful that the purse-snatcher has somehow followed her and broken in, she spends the night in a trunk in the attic. In Montana, another middle-aged woman also experiences a night of terror in ``Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer,'' but hers happened 21 years before, when she went seeking thrills on the local Indian reservation, got drunk, then hit and killed another drunk while driving home. The dead man was an Indian, and her father quietly repaired the truck damage, so she kept her secret, but thereafter hers was a haunted existence. Dora, in ``Necessary Angels,'' has an affair at the age of 14 with a sullen, older black youth. She becomes pregnant, has an abortion, then self-destructively drifts; by contrast, her ex- lover moves away and eventually makes something of himself. Although in essence these stories are grim studies of lost possibilities, the rhythmic beauty of Thon's writing is everywhere extraordinary: Here is a writer who can really sing the blues. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

While her name is not widely known, Thon has published a story collection (Girls in the Grass, LJ 4/15/91) and a critically acclaimed novel (Iona Moon, LJ 5/15/93); this year, Granta named her one of the country's best young novelists. Thon's ability to create powerful interior voices for her dramatic, disturbed characters is remarkable; their interior monologs carry readers to unexpected situations and to places?both actual and emotional?where some might not necessarily want to go. Thon's characters?a morgue worker, a teenage runaway with a crack habit, a housewife who is mugged and whose house is then robbed?are immersed in a depressing, seamy side of life. Unlike many young writers, Thon ranges widely in characters and settings, but these seven stories sometimes seem fragmented, and the hard-hitting, depressing tone will put off some readers. Obviously an early work of an emerging talent, this is recommended for all larger fiction collections.?Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039578588X
• ISBN 13: 9780395785881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165