Customer Reviews

An American Affair

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While Mark Brazaitis's RIVER OF LOST VOICES was an extraordinary debut, he has come into his own as a master storyteller in AN AMERICAN AFFAIR. Together, the two volumes cement his place as the leading chronicler in American fiction of the ins and outs of life in Guatemala. Brazaitis is uniquely qualified to do this work, by his extensive in-country experience (in the Peace Corps) and by his nuanced understanding of the contexts-historical, social and political-in which his stories take place. Brazaitis's background in history (a B.A from Harvard) and comprehensive reading about Guatemala enable him to ground the action of his stories in the reality of place in a way that is extraordinary in expatriate fiction. The ghost of Graham Greene animates this work, and that is a high compliment.

While many of the stories in AN AMERICAN AFFAIR do have a political edge-and this is one of their virtues, they teach-Brazaitis never allows politics to hijack a story. Indeed, it is in the mastering of narrative that these stories move forward from his previous work: every piece in the collection, no matter what formal strategy it pursues, maintains a spanking pace. Brazaitis has done a remarkable job of wedding the concerns of serious fiction with the narrative pull of the best popular fiction. That this book is written to a high literary standard is evident by its winning the George Garrett Prize in Short Fiction. But readers will not need the prize citation to recognize just how good the book is: the prose is extremely economical and yet also beautiful; the movement of the sentences is so assured, no word, no pause out of place.

Brazaitis has a deep understanding of the many ways of being human, and this allows him to convincingly tell stories from the perspective of men and women, Americans and native Guatemalans. Because he is able to inhabit so many different points of view, the world of AN AMERICAN AFFAIR achieves a kind of 3-D vividness. It's there in each particular story, but the stories together suggest a whole world, as multifarious as reality itself. As readers, we both know the stories we read and come to believe that each of the minor characters must also have a story to tell. And we've no sooner finished AN AMERICAN AFFAIR then we want to hear those stories...

I would like to single out "Air Conditioning and Heat," "The Foreign Correspondent," and "Iris, Thirty Years Later," as three of the best stories I've read in years (and I've read plenty). All three delve deep into the heart of the matter. They generate both pathos and understanding; they move us, so what's said can count deep down. These stories can stand with the best short fiction written by an American writer in the last 10 years.

Reluctantly, I gave this book five stars. It's not a five-star book at all by amazon.com standards. It's a ten-star book (at least). It's the best short story collection I've read in years. Brazaitis is a master of the form. Every single story is precise, powerful, poignant. This collection deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. I don't know what's up with the Texas Review Press, but AN AMERICAN AFFAIR was published in Fall 2005, and a cover image is still not here on amazon.com in February 2006. It's a shame that one of the big publishing houses didn't get this extraordinary book and promote it in the way it deserves. It would be a national bestseller.