Set in the country, thirteen poignant, funny stories, some previously published, feature a cast of characters whose self-delusions and self-discoveries visit them in prisons, trailer parks, and in male group therapy sessions. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The characters in these edgy, slick stories are all suffering from identity crises or illusions of one sort or another, like the convict in "Babyman" whose girlfriend convinces him, falsely, that she's pregnant in order to con him out of his meager savings and who finds that he can't give up the idea of his imaginary child. Or the B-movie fan for whom the viewing of "Island of Lost Souls" (the 1932 horror classic in which the beast-men of the mad surgeon's laboratory chant "Are we not men?") provides the defining moment of his otherwise dreary existence. Hovering between comedy and despair, Spencer creates characters on the edge of finding bliss--or losing it completely.
From Publishers Weekly
Reverberating with echoes of Raymond Carver, the 13 stories in Spencer's (The Lost Son) first collection chronicle, with rueful wit and a gritty photo-realism, the anger and loneliness of a mostly blue-collar cast of Midwestern men. These tales of degeneration, decay and emasculation are played out in hospitals, prisons, dive bars and seedy apartments, whose inhabitants, trapped in failing or failed relationships, drink to escape or just to avoid intimacy. The dolefully funny, eponymous, lead story, told in second-person vignettes that resemble cinematic dissolves, describes a man who takes refuge in movies (identifying in particular with the beast-men of the 1932 H.G. Welles adaptation, Island of Lost Souls), while his marriage hits the skids. "I flunked Prozac," laments Ned, the dyspeptic narrator of "The Last of the Nice," who reluctantly enters a men's support group after his wife runs off, but storms out in a fit of anger and self-pity. Anger and frustration in these stories are often diverted and re-expressed in ugly ways, as in "Haven't You Ever Seen Cary Grant?" where a college professor exacts a nasty revenge on a recently widowed neighbor who accuses him of stealing car parts. Especially poignant are stories about children who fail to bring parents together, and whose lives are destroyed in the process, as in "The Small Things that Save Us," about a struggling one-armed farmer named Easy, and "All I Ever Wanted," in which the narrator's estranged girlfriend sells her baby to Gypsies. The writing sometimes grows flat and sentimental, but the whole collection possesses a harsh and wrenching agnosticism. "Despair I can handle," says a divorced philosophy professor of a weekend binge with her out-of-town boyfriend in one story. "It's hope that kills."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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More About the Author
I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, but grew up mainly in northeastern Pennsylvania, though my family is from southern Indiana and northern Kentucky. I'm the author of The Lost Son, a novel, and Are We Not Men?, a collection of short fiction, both from Arcade Publishing, run by the legendary Richard Seaver. My most recent book is Rattlesnake Daddy: A Son's Search for His Father, a memoir about my father's mysterious life and death (The Backwaters Press). My short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Missouri Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. I teach fiction writing and screenwriting at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
I'm married to the writer Jonis Agee. Together we are the indentured servants to two bichons frises and one horse. We live in Ponca Hills, which is on the Missouri River, north of Omaha, Nebraska. For more information, go to brentspencerwriter.com.
(Photo credit: Miriam Berkley)
I'm married to the writer Jonis Agee. Together we are the indentured servants to two bichons frises and one horse. We live in Ponca Hills, which is on the Missouri River, north of Omaha, Nebraska. For more information, go to brentspencerwriter.com.
(Photo credit: Miriam Berkley)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best collection I've read since Tobias Wolfe's The Night,
By A Customer
This review is from: Are We Not Men ? (Hardcover)
The best collection I've read since Tobias Wolfe's The Night in Question. Like Wolfe, Spencer manages the deft trick of taking on matters of real heft with a light and even comic hand. And unlikemost collections, Spencer's has a satisfying cumulative effect--its early squinty-eyed perspective slowly relaxes to offer a wider and more hopeful field of vision. As entertaining and moving as Spencer's Lost Son, which is saying something. --A reader in Fallbrook, California.
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