Under the Light

In a series of interconnected short stories, Harry Drake battles to preserve his ideals, honor, and ardor as he comes of age within the ambiguous context of the new American West

Rebutting the vision of an American West of boundless possibilities, these 15 stories, written in lean, muscular prose, conjure a constricted landscape where graffiti defaces the bark of the aspens and where the townsfolk make bets over whether or not magpies feeding on dead coyotes' innards will get run over by 18-wheelers. In the title story, Harry Drake, the book's tough yet vulnerable protagonist, wistfully recalls playing backyard baseball with his plucky mother. Harry is a man in search of self in a rootless America. Several pieces evoke his adolescence; in other stories a grown-up Harry filches coins from elderly women gamblers at the casino where he works, or confronts his 12-year-old son, who has a drinking problem. "Willows," a powerful gothic tale, concerns an old colonel's secret doings with a misshapen boy who may be a hermaphrodite. While some of the stories lack depth and others suffer from an arty stream-of-consciousness mode, this is, on balance, a promising debut by a Western writer with a real feel for his home territory.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fifteen stories, set in Montana and Nevada: part Hemingway sparseness, part lush poetry that's sometimes overwritten--two kinds of fiction seen recently in the pages of The Quarterly, where several of these first appeared. Though a character named Harry Drake is used to interlink all of these pieces, the same Harry doesn't appear in every story. That is, there's little chronology or thematic coherence between most of these stories, and the use of Harry seems more a whim than useful connection. Even so, of the Hemingway clones, ``Smoke'' is a tense narrative about a down-on-his-luck Harry who lives in a cottage across from the Timmonses. He gets the hots for Mrs. Timmons, but she proves more than he bargained for when he enters her bedroom not to taste the ``bearded clam'' but to have her insert needles painfully into his blood blister. Of the stories drunk on their own prose, ``Reno, Reno, Reno, Reno'' is the best: Harry, with best friend Tom and dog Spivey, is taken in, as is Harry's mother, by Mr. Oates and his dog Dog. Oates is an extravagant character full of schemes who finally gets Harry's mother into bed even as Spivey, smelling of skunk, mates with Dog. ``Great Basin,'' written effectively from a young Harry's point of view, is about waiting with his father in the desert at a convenience stop for a gas truck to arrive. The other stories are competent, in either of the two styles, but not remarkable. In ``The Beast, Watered,'' Harry comes home to his wife after adultery; in ``I Am Not So Old,'' he flirts with a waitress while his wife has a baby; and in ``The Route,'' he visits his son, who (``either eleven or twelve'') drinks and curses lasciviously. A new voice from the West, in thrall to fictional fashion but beginning to find its way to originality. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.