The Way People Run: Stories - Hardcover

Tilghman, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067944971X ISBN 13: 9780679449713

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

In The Way People Run, one of America's finest writers, the author of Mason's Retreat ("magnificent"--Publishers Weekly) and In a Father's Place ("radiant"--The New York Times), gives us a new collection of stunning short stories, brilliant fiction about the deep emotional connections, and disconnections, between people and within people's inner lives. Against the backdrop of vivid settings, especially the Chesapeake Bay region and the American West, Tilghman writes with passion, generosity, and grace about the ways people con-front themselves and the lives they've created. In The Way People Run, chosen by Robert Stone for the 1992 Best American Short Stories volume, a man goes west to find a new job and, out of the framework of the familiar, loses his hold on his family and his old life. In Something Important, Peter Ramsey undertakes a reunion with his long-lost brother, and discovers that his wife is in love with someone else. In Things Left Undone, chosen by Tobias Wolff to appear in the 1994 Best American Short Stories, a young couple tries to survive a tragedy. As Andre Dubus said about In a Father's Place, Christopher Tilghman "is a spiritual writer who often looks at things the rest of us cannot see." Life's truths are at the heart of these magnificent stories by a modern American master.

Praise for Mason's Retreat

Magnificent...Tilghman's first novel places him securely in the ranks of our most accomplished writers."                          
--Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written...fully imagined...Few first novels are narrated with the clarity, economy, and masterful assurance Tilghman brings to this re-markably moving and persuasive tale."                    
--Entertainment Weekly

Rich with character and sweet with the scent of a Maryland farm in America's mid-century summer...The moral center of this novel is larger than all its sorrows, which have about them the inevitable arc of a star falling from a darkening sky."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for In a Father's Place
A collection that signals the appearance of a gifted new writer."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A simple, classic feel, as if written from deep in the American grain...It is a magnificent portrait."
--Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

About Mason's Retreat

Echoes of The Great Gatsby, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, O'Neill, and Faulkner...a stunning individual achievement."                                
--Kirkus Reviews

Mason's Retreat is a brilliant book--full of wisdom and insight into the workings of the soul. The language is perfect. Every paragraph holds a treasure. This is one of the most thoroughly satisfying novels you will ever read."    --Kaye Gibbons

Powerful...a work of surpassing thematic seriousness and fictive artistry. In all respects, Mason's Retreat is exemplary."
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Tilghman is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer's Award, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Caroline Preston, and their three sons.

From the Back Cover

Christopher Tilghman has now taken his place in a line of classic American writers--among them John Cheever, William Maxwell, and Wright Morris."
--Edward Hirsch

A true storyteller." --Richard Eder

Reviews

The six rich and complex stories here will add to the reputation Tilghman established in In a Father's Place and the novel Mason's Retreat. As in much of his earlier work, family homes, and journeys to them, play a central role, from a modest "old family cottage on the Rappahannock" to a once grand Hattiesburg home now become a funeral parlor. Redolent with family history, these properties quickly remind the characters they have not lived up to standards set for them. In "Room for Mistakes," Hal, a Boston banker who appeared in a story in Tilghman's first collection, returns, when his mother dies, to the Montana cattle ranch where he grew up, ostensibly to settle the estate but in fact to make peace with the mother he could not satisfy and with the profession that now bores him to death. Gradually, Hal comes to see managing the ranch as his opportunity to salve both wounds, finding the mercies of "a place to come home to." As the book's title suggests, Tilghman's characters are in flight, often to the family property, seeking an answer in their heritage. In the title narrative, Barry, an unemployed fund manager on a fruitless job search in the West, takes a side trip on his way to his wife and children in New York. He visits the dying prairie town where his maternal grandfather retreated after he abandoned his proper Hartford family. What is clear as Barry leaves this barren community, deciding to turn west and away from his own family, is that he has found some of his grandfather in himself. Tilghman grants all his characters dignity, even those who appear to fail, and takes care to make the reader feel the full weight of their lives, skillfully filling in years of history in a few deft sentences. Indeed, the closing story, "Things Left Undone," covers as much terrainAa marriage, a child's birth, that child's death, the breaking and the mending of the marriageAas many far less moving novels. In this short narrative, as in all the others, Tilghman takes his characters through their darkest hours and into the light again, a journey he makes the reader grateful to feel to the bone. Author tour. (May) FYI: The title story appears in The Best American Short Stories 1992; another story will appear in this year's volume.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Separation anxiety and strong emotion repressed almost to the point of suffocation are the constants that are analyzedwith sometimes excessive precisionin this otherwise impressive gathering of six carefully crafted stories by the author of an earlier collection, In a Father's Place (1990), and the novel Mason's Retreat (1996). The premises and animating situations are often quite striking here. ``The Late Night News,'' for example, forces a complacent widower and ex-husband into panicked self-doubt when a teenaged burglar (``a messenger from the dark'') violates his isolation and security. A husband and father heading home from a job-hunting trip finds in a ``ruined'' western town (in the moody title story), a chastening reflection of his own unhappy domesticity. ``Something Important'' about his endangered marriage is revealed to a cautious high-school English teacher by the boorish older brother he disrespects and mistrusts. And a New Englander returned to his late mother's Montana ranch (in ``Room for Mistakes'') makes peace as best he can with his taciturn, cleareyed stepfather. The mingled intimacy and unknowing we share and suffer as family members are unforgettably dramatized in the best pieces. In ``A Suitable Good-bye,'' thirtysomething freelance consultant Lee travels with his widowed mother and young nephew on a mission to find the grave of her father, who had abandoned his family decades agoand learns that their journey has been a gesture intended to soothe Lee's own incompletion and loneliness. And the superb ``Things Left undone'' charts the emotional odyssey of dairy farmer Denny McCready and his wife Susan, their marriage ripped apart when their infant son dies of inherited cystic fibrosis, then tentatively given the possibility of repair as they labor to forgive each other and themselves. There's a little of Tobias Wolff in Tilghman's rigorous focus on how family concerns define us and haunt us. The way his people run occasionally feels contrived, but in his best stories we feel deeply for them and wish them safely home again. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Tilghman's fiction is rooted in family life, whether his short stories are set along the Chesapeake Bay or on the cold, scouring expanses of Montana. He has traversed these terrains in earlier works, but his feeling for the enduring connection between place and the self remains fresh. In "Something Important," Peter is surprised by his estranged brother's invitation to meet at their family's riverside cottage. He figures Mitch is in the usual trouble, but he's the one heading for a fall. A man drives from New York to the Great Plains in the title story, ostensibly to look for his grandfather's land, but what he's truly in search of is a new identity. The long drive west marks a personal milestone for another man in "Room for Mistakes." Hal makes the journey from his banker's life in Boston back to his family's ranch after his mother's death and recovers a lost sense of home. Driven by doubt and affection, Tilghman's pilgrims count on women for guidance, and know they're blessed when they find it. Donna Seaman

Tilghman is a truly gifted writer who can get inside people's weaknesses and make sense of actions so often misunderstood among families. The value of relationships between family, friends, and lovers and their emotional interactions are familiar territory in Tilghman's work. In "Room for Mistakes," Tilghman revisits Hal and Marcie and the hauntingly beautiful landscape of Montana found in his previous volume of stories, the much-heralded In a Father's Place (LJ 5/15/90). Whether he is writing of wide-open ranches or the Eastern shore, the connection to place is rich and rewarding. A magnificent selection of readings that does not disappoint.AShannon Williams Haddock, Bellsouth Corporate Lib. & Business Research Ctr., Birmingham, AL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067944971X
• ISBN 13: 9780679449713
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209