The Book of Lost Fathers: Stories (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Wilson, Robley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801867177 ISBN 13: 9780801867170

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001

Synopsis

"Why is it the worst things happen when you're most relaxed and your head's empty of everything serious?" These words, from the narrator of the story "Grief," are at the heart of The Book of Lost Fathers, the new collection of short fiction by Robley Wilson. These stories depict ordinary, recognizable people dealing with loneliness, loss, and mortality. A woman and her father experience an earthquake, and the incident reinforces the frailty of the dying man. A man must confront his fiancée's past when he realizes the identity of the "stranger" they meet on vacation. A best man arrives late for his friend's wedding, only to learn that the groom has died hours before.

Combining an evocative and compassionate style with familiar characters and enduring messages, Wilson treats fundamental questions of love, suffering, and humanity. His "lost fathers" provide a common thread that weaves together stories about fathers, husbands, and lovers, past and present -- and the women whose lives they change.

About this title

About the Author

Robley Wilson's Robley Wilson's previous story collections include Terrible Kisses, Living Alone, and Dancing for Men,which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Nicholl Fellow in Screenwriting. For 31 years he edited the North American Review, and now lives in Florida with his wife, fiction writer Susan Hubbard.

Reviews

Set in various locales ranging from small New England towns to Florida resorts, Midwestern farms to earthquake-ridden California, this haunting collection of stories is told from the points of view of jilted women, widowed wives, bewildered children and grieving men. Characters struggle to deal with the absence of fathers, whether from desertion, natural death or the "gradual dissolving away" of family life. One of the standouts, "Dorothy and Her Friends," takes a bizarre twist as Dorothy, who lives in a Boston apartment with her bitter, religious mother, begins an affair with a traveling evangelist. Deserted by her father at age 12, she now wonders, "What in the world was it that made men leave marriage, abandon family as if the truly important lay somewhere else?" For Dorothy, her father's legacy continues as men enter and leave her life "as swift as rare, intractable birds." Often Wilson simply refers to characters as "the wife" or "the son," emphasizing how family relationships mold their identities. In "Trespass," a divorced architect faces his estranged father's death and the fact that his ex-wife was included in the will, but he was not. "Florida" presents the postdivorce perspective of "lost" fathers like Fowler, who vacations with his fianc‚e and her two daughters in an attempt to mesh splintered families into a new whole. The last image in the final story, "A Day of Splendid Omens," finds a grieving woman cradling her young daughter as she whispers stories about the girl's dead father. The image captures the tone of the entire collection, in which Wilson adeptly illustrates in an unsentimental manner the sometimes devastating powers of family, love and loss.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801867177
• ISBN 13: 9780801867170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240