Charity [Hardcover]

Mark Richard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1998

With Charity, Mark Richard again secures the distinction of poet laureate of the orphaned poor, the broken, the deceived, and the unrelieved. In stylistic brilliance, he renders their conditions with grace and compassion, and redeems and transports their tragedy with wicked humor.

In the much-anthologized "The Birds for Christmas," two hospitalized boys beg a night nurse to let them watch Hitchcock's classic thriller film on television, believing it will relieve their Yuletide loneliness. "Gentleman's Agreement" is a classic father-son story of fear and the violence of love. In "Memorial Day," a bayou boy learns the lessons of living from Death himself, a fortune cookie-eating phantom who claims to be "a people person." From charity ward to outrageous beach bungalow, Richard visits the overlooked corners of America, making them unforgettably visible.

Richard has been rightly compared to Faulkner for his language and to Flannery O'Connor for his stark moral vision, but his force and sensibility remain his own. Charity is a powerful reading experience, a true accomplishment in an already stunning literary career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mark Richard (The Ice at the Bottom of the World, Fishboy) populates his latest collection of short stories, Charity, with a desperate cast of characters--including an old, alcohol-soaked limo driver and hospitalized orphans. And as their lack of luck would have it, charity comes to them in only sand-sized pieces: a nurse lets sick boys watch a tiny television one night in "The Birds for Christmas"; in "Gentleman's Agreement" a father takes out a son's stitches instead of cutting off his hand. From these grim lives, Richard doesn't draw grand conclusions; rather, with each story in the collection he lays out the banal, surreal, and even disgusting aspects of his characters' lives. What makes it all bearable is Richard's economy of language and utter originality.

Take "Where Blue Is Blue." Here, a gang of deadbeat men spend their days hanging around the beach in their shark-fishing town. When a contortionist from a visiting circus turns up dead and dismembered in the bay, they are the ones willing to trawl for hands, ears, etc., in exchange for a bit of liquor cash. (Mangled and deformed body parts appear in other stories, too: cleft palates, a club foot, and a boy with a tail.) As Richard sketches these men's days, he hands out just enough and just the right details. At the same time, he manages to articulate the elusive way in which these misfits have a meaningful understanding of the sea--and what it promises those close to it. Such balance is more than Charity's saving grace: it's the reason why Richard's book is a tantalizing read.

From Publishers Weekly

The desperation and loneliness of poverty-mired and dead-end lives are reflected with pathos or shocking black humor in Richard's second collection of 10 short stories (the first was the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning Ice at the Bottom of the World). The diversity of tone and vision in this collection keeps the reader reeling. Richard's distinctive prose, segueing from terse sentences, Southern-cadenced "y'alls" and casual profanity to lush, Faulknerish arabesques, reflects pain, bewilderment, bravado and resignation?but never the facile epiphanies of characters who have the leisure to think about the emptiness of their lives. Some of his characters are children or teenagers born into poor and isolating environments who, like the protagonist of his novel, Fishboy, find themselves even worse off when they try to escape than they previously were. In "Memorial Day," a boy hoping to ward off Death?a talkative spirit who wears "white pants and a white dinner jacket"?from his dying older brother, is himself seduced. In "Gentleman's Agreement," a weary father, too poor on a firefighter's wages to pay a doctor to take the stitches out of his son's injured head, does it himself with pliers, "snipping and tugging at the black silky thread that had bound together the torn flesh." In "The Birds for Christmas," two orphan boys who have not been invited from the chronic ward of a state hospital to a home for the holiday ask to watch Hitchcock's The Birds. At movie's end, the narrator admits, "It was Christmas Eve. And we were sore afraid" of the future. But there is justice too, as in the surprise ending of "Where Blue Is Blue," a story in which the bizarre?the mangled body of a circus contortionist washes up on a beach?is rendered with commonplace detail. Richard's imagination generally encompasses the bleak, the raunchy and the eccentric, but he goes over the edge in "Fun at the Beach," a tale with characters so hilariously grotesque that it takes a strong stomach to read about them. While he is indisputably a master of words, Richard's stylistic legerdemain will appeal mainly to those willing to follow an author down a dark and slippery path. Editor, Nan Talese; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1st edition (August 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385425627
• ISBN-13: 978-0385425629
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #275,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Killer collection of short stories, December 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Charity (Hardcover)

A wonderfull collection of stories from one of the most original voices in American literature. As soon as I finished reading it, I started it again. I was left wanting to see more of these tragic characters. Any of them could have filled their own novel, especially Cyphus and Samuel from "Tunga Tugga, Lingua Dingua." This is why I like short stories. Richard doesn't disappoint.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal, January 14, 2002

By 

"porchkittyfilms" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charity (Hardcover)

The first story Gentleman's Agreement and another story The Birds for Christmas alone are worth the price of this collection. Richard is working from a different place in a different light. As a former student of his, I can tell you that's he's the real deal. Even though his classes were sometimes run like a revival meeting, as he admits, there's something almost Biblical in these stories. Check it out.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great American Writer, November 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Charity (Hardcover)

Mark Richard's work may stand alongside the work of Larry Brown and Barry Hannah as great contemporary Southern literature, but CHARITY proves that Richard should stand next to Styron and Faulkner as one of this century's great American writers. This is an amazing collection that bridges a remarkable collections of emotions, attitudes, worlds...Read it.