The Tall Uncut: Stories - Softcover

Fromm, Pete

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0936784954 ISBN 13: 9780936784953

Publisher: John Daniel & Co, 1992

Synopsis

Stories deal with hunting and fishing, long car trips through open landscape, and relationships in the American West

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A first collection of 17 stories set in the America West among men, and sometimes women, for whom hunting and fishing are self- defining actions. The best pieces use such action to take the reader into the vagaries of character, but the book is most memorable for its evocative descriptions of landscape. The title story is a rather rambling telling about an adolescent who goes to stay in Chicago with his Grandma when his parents, committed flyers, are killed. The ``tall uncut,'' a legend concerning a nearly perfect stand of trees--trees that are then cut to the ground--serves as metaphor for the process whereby the narrator finds his way past his Grandma's fears (she doesn't want him to fly) to his own life. ``Mardi Gras,'' a road-story about a man who leaves Denver, convinced of his wife's infidelity, for New Orleans and Carnival, is very good in managing to relate Bourbon Street wildness to the man's anguish. Likewise, in ``Bean Time,'' a philanderer husband has reached the ``disentanglement phase'' of his latest affair, and a switch in point of view to the aggrieved wife brings home the bacon by forcing the reader into a complex sympathy. Of the rest, the fishing and/or hunting stories (``Mighty Mouse and Blue Cheese from the Moon,'' ``Trash Fish,'' etc.) survive some sentimentality to track relationships that are either winding down or revving up. Fromm, a professional outdoorsman, is at his best when he stays close to what he knows--the way the wild reduces or enlarges human events. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

For a few of the characters in Fromm's expert first collection of stories, the American West is a region of the imagination, a place of myths born from storytelling and old photographs. A grandmother in the title piece longs to see the virgin forests--forests destroyed 15 years before she was even born. For others the West is a hard place where myth and reality violently collide, sometimes leaving broken bodies or spirits in the aftermath. These characters are eccentrics with "get-rich-quick" schemes and people who reach the ends of their tethers and blow their own heads off with shotguns. Other stories deal with love and family. The broad expanse of open country is not the only distance two newly met lovers need to traverse on the way to intimacy in "Eloping." Two of the best stories are "Mardi Gras," about a man racing to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, running away from his life and a wife he suspects of cheating on him, and "Broken Flock," a story at once about duck hunting and a dysfunctional family. Fromm writes in a lean, straightforward style befitting his subject matter, a barren land and the sometimes equally desolate lives of the people who populate it.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Daniel & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0936784954
• ISBN 13: 9780936784953
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176