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Afternoon in the Jungle: The Selected Short Stories of Albert Maltz

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Afternoon In The Jungle is a superb collection of stories. Crisply written without being terse, Albert Maltz' works are a stylistic hybrid of Ernest Hemingway, Edward Hopper, and Norman Rockwell. Each of the stories relates to Americans in America as it is, not as it is idealized. Without being outright disrespectful and critical of our country, the human dramas Maltz has written concern social problems that have not been fully resolved, even decades after these stories were written. The spiritually impoverishing drudgery of manual labor finds a home in a nameless town when a circus comes. Racism threatens the life of an unborn child. Suicide erupts in a tranquil urban setting. Corruption mars the landscape in a Southern town. A poor child learns the destructiveness of greed when he faces another, equally poor man one late winter afternoon. Two couples are ruined or threatened by dangerous job conditions. When I first read this collection over seven years ago, none of these stories failed to pleasantly surprise me. I was raised on formulaic thrillers and short stories, and reading this book opened my eyes in many ways. First of all it showed me that villainy was sometimes faceless, socially accepted, and borne of wide-scale apathy. The protagonists were sharply defined, but often their antagonists were not simply other people. Sometimes they were never even seen. Second, it introduced me to the true power of irony in literature. It was stronger -- and to me, more effective -- in these works than anything I have read by Hemingway. If a story can make you see the wrongness of the situation without having to correlate a dozen other subtle, previous ironies, the author has done his job well. None of the stories in here is ironic just for irony's sake; each example of such is carefully but plainly crafted to point to and enrich each theme. Last of all, Afternoon in the Jungle showed me the most credible, natural character motivations and actions I'd ever seen in a work of literature. I could see the flow of social dynamics in almost every action the characters took: how they spoke; who they spoke with and how; how they reinforced society, or how they tried to disrupt, destroy, or better it. The heroes and heroines in these stories were American Everymen. On a whim, I searched Amazon.com to see if this, one of my favorite books of all time, was still available. I am happy to see that it still is, and would just as gladly recommend it to you. I feel that though Afternoon in the Jungle may be fairly obscure now, it is a technically and spiritually magnificent example of 20th-Century American writing at its very finest.