A Primitive Heart: Stories - Hardcover

Rabe, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802118070 ISBN 13: 9780802118073

Publisher: Grove Press, 2005

Synopsis

A Primitive Heart is a collection of stories that moves into areas untouched in David Rabe's previous work, cutting to the quick of American manhood and revealing the distance within the most intimate relationships. Whether he is writing about a marriage shadowed by the unacknowledged discord of a risky pregnancy, about a group of men whose attempt to settle an account launches them toward unexpected violence, or about a young journalist who believes he's escaped his Catholic roots, but is forced again to confront them by a priest who once was his mentor as a writer, Rabe's voice tenders an inimitable portrait of America and offers a benediction to her struggling souls.

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Reviews

Playwright Rabe (Hurlyburly, etc.), in this collection, navigates the troubled lives of men set adrift by economic hopelessness, traumatic childhoods and their own inability to connect. The narrator of the title story becomes obsessed with the development of his unborn child, even as he drifts further apart from his strong-willed wife. "Veranda" describes both the failed beginning of a new relationship and a failed attempt to make amends to a child for the end of an old one. "Holy Men" and "Some Loose Change" stand out as powerful evocations of contemporary manhood, the former in a successful writer's fraught reunion with the Catholic priest who mentored him, the latter through the attempts of a group of boozy dot-com casualties to even an old financial score. "Early Madonna," the only story with a female protagonist, features an aging club kid attempting to escape the shadow of her brainy younger sister. Abstracted inner monologues and minute descriptions sometimes come at the expense of pacing and dialogue in these often multi-chaptered first-person stories, and the solipsism of Rabe's emotionally immature characters blinds them to the reality of their interaction with others. But these stories;occasionally tedious but also marked by strikingly good observational prose;perceptively sketch the experiences of 21st-century misfits.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802118070
• ISBN 13: 9780802118073
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304