Customer Reviews

Boys House: New & Selected Stories

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Every now and then some treasure of our national literature slips in under the radar, and it's not until years later that we realize the importance of that writer. Jim Heynen is one of these. Bayard Taylor was everyone's favorite poet in the mid-nineteenth century, while Walt Whitman worked to find himself a publisher. Likewise, Heynen works in the shadows of more popular humorists like Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris, but he has more wisdom and real charm than the two of them combined. He's as close as we have to Mark Twain writing today but with a thoroughly modern sensibility. "The boys," the chief protagonists of his tales, are the anonymous witnesses to the dramatic changes of the twentieth century--but as they happen on a microcosmic level. Heynen talks about class, the loss of the agrarian way of life, the disappearance of country wisdom, and the new privilege accorded a global view over local knowledge--but he does it with the "things" William Carlos Williams demanded of great literature. When one of the boys learns that they have bred kicking out of milk cows, so that no one will be hurt anymore, he says to his grandfather, "That's good, isn't?" To which his grandfather says only, "What do you think?" The point is that each generation's incremental gain also distances them further from their past, and perhaps each easing of the present makes us appreciate less the suffering of our forebears. Heynen knows farm boys and tractors and cows and barns and all the other things that will soon be lost to our children and completely foreign to their children. In a hundred years, these will be our descendants only touchstones to the present we take for granted, a past they will need. Buy this book and read it to your children and grandchildren.

I stumbled upon this book basically by accident at the local library and found it a delicious read. Short, prose-poem length stories about life on the farm through the eyes of a group of boys. There is no plot, the boys are not named, and no specific setting, just funny, wise, and relatable events that could happen anywhere in the region. I found myself literally smiling while reading this book, and I finished it in utter delight. The tales are first-rate; the author brings life to ordinary moments (and exciting moments too) in a way that will inspire reader to write a book of his own. Heynen has studied writing for a lot of his life. This shows. The writing is excellent. This is fine, fine literature folks, and an easy read to boot.