The Sexual Life of Savages and Other Stories

From the dark side of rural and urban life comes Stokes Howell's collection of stories. Italo Calvino wrote on five essential attributes of fiction: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. Stokes Howell's stories embody these essentials. Each story is tough and quick, each observation lightly wrought with an exactitude that churns with freight. A dark, brooding morbidity; a harrowed, sexual tour de force. Sex is the engine that drives these tales: under the Brooklyn Bridge, in a restaurant bathroom, on the banks of the Mississippi. These stories are jazz riffs on abandonment. The human animals grunt and slink and desire their way toward satisfaction, or mystery, or heaven.

Two very different landscapes, rural Missouri and urban New York City, inform 21 tales told by two searingly realistic, male first-person voices that expose a hard, unforgiving core at the center of relationships and sexual experiences. In the rural setting, the young narrator embarks on low-life adventures like those recalled in "Baker," in which he gets drunk on whiskey, hangs out with a 62-year-old man who knows every whore in town and ends up meeting two of them. What is poignant is how, as the narrator explains his dubious encounters, he is at once naive and possessed of enough self-awareness to convey his sense of exhilaration-and of dissociation and loss. This kind of heightened emotional paradox is even more pronounced in those stories set in New York City. The speaker of "In the Bathroom at Joey's Restaurant" describes his longtime, tumultuous relationship with Veronica-who breaks up with him constantly, only to want him back-as she is, once again, trying to reunite with him. Howell's stripped-bare, kinetic voice captures both the speaker's love for Veronica and his desire to get away from the psychodrama that being with her entails. A sly, bittersweet humor runs as an undercurrent throughout, as in the surreal "Willie and Jackie," an ill-fated love story about a wildebeest and a jellyfish. Overall, Howell's bracing prose and honesty about the dark side of love renders this collection sad, funny and devastatingly articulate.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Not many story collections include an introduction by the author, but Howell clearly thinks readers need to be prepared for the wildly different subjects (and styles) on display in his first volume, some parts of which have appeared in various small magazines. Howell argues for an urban/rural dialectic here, but the city pieces seem less defined by place than by a shared voice: An angry male, done wrong by his women and venting his spleen in vile language. Three tales are also linked by the presence of Veronica, an unstable, obsessive woman who renews her sexual relation with the narrator in a Brooklyn restaurant bathroom (``In the Bathroom at Joey's Restaurant''). He eventually writes a letter (``Dear Veronica'') demanding the return of a favorite sweater, then takes his own obsessiveness a bit further when he breaks into her apartment and masturbates on her underwear and sheets (``Unction''). Howell plumbs bitter love in many guises: a stream- of-consciousness riff on a fickle woman that alternates between abusive language about her and civil telephone chatter with her (the title story); an anecdotal piece describing a date with a drunk (``A Date''); and another date story, this with a married woman the narrator hopes to bed (``Dinner''). Experimental bits include some formless verse on grief (``The Pink Clouds Are Blood''), and a bizarre little love story between a wildebeest and a jellyfish (``Willie and Jackie''). Two hilarious bits update the stories of La BohŠme and Oedipus, the first as a contemporary tale of a bulimic bohemian in Paris, the second set in a small modern Illinois town. Six stories, all similar in voice, are set in a rural South of outrageous, over-the-top shenanigans involving liquor, women, and low-comic antics, the best being the record of a hilarious drunken Passion Play in the longish ``My Education,'' a tale offering inspired goofiness on a par with T.R. Pearson. On balance: too many disagreeable and disposable pieces detract from some solid storytelling. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reading "My Life of Crime," "My Education," and "Sin," the best stories in this wildly uneven first collection, is akin to standing next to a manic, slightly inebriated stranger at a cocktail party and hearing about his dangerously interesting life, until, much later, exhausted from listening, you realize that although it is not the sort of life you would choose to live, it has been a great three hours. Set variously in small towns along the Mississippi River and in New York City, these raunchy, funny, and heartbreaking stories all deal with young men whose main interest in life is a passionate examination of their relationships with women. Several of the stories in this collection, including "I Wish I Was Dead" and "The Diary of Oedipus," don't work. They are somewhat clever creative writing exercises that probably should have remained unpublished in Howell's desk drawer. Still, the good stories here are very good indeed, full of a rambunctious energy and an appealing, off-kilter sensibility. Nancy Pearl