Driving the Heart and Other Stories [Hardcover]

Jason Brown (Author), Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

A stunningly elegant and highly original debut collection of stories at once dark and poignant, funny and bleak. Brown plumbs the hearts and minds of characters trying to make sense of their lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In one of the 13 stories in this extraordinary debut collection, a boy recalls the wisdom of an elderly woman: "alteration of reality into new forms created a beauty more true than what I could see with my own eyes." The author himself rises to this challenge, and where his stories are not simply beautiful, they invariably leave an indelible impression of the grotesquely or sharply sublime. Brown provides detailed contexts, whether he's wryly and poetically portraying "The Sadness of Bodies," describing the duties of a human organ transport team or showing the effects of dysfunctional parenting. In "Thief," a boy whose manic-depressive mother repeatedly locks herself in her room breaks into another home to absorb the milieu of a "normal" mother. In the process, he steals thingsAthe reenactment of his parents' theft of his childhood. Brown neatly handles the eccentricities of mental illness, describing with bleak humor the dying mother in "Animal Stories" who replaces her past with others' memories. The most stunning tale is "The Coroner's Report," offering sundry oddities about death against the poignant backdrop of damaged lives. We learn of a man sliced in half who maintained an anxious conversation for five more hours, and another who shot himself in the head but drove home, drew a bath and died in the tub. Brown excels at portraying the life struggles of those with ravaged psychic resources, unique people and their alienated offspring at life's dark edges, at times as creepy as they are enticing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A debut collection of 13 stories, most of them portraying the unhappy domestic life of contemporary Americans. Brown seems to have set out to reverse Tolstoys famous dictum by offering us a group of unhappy families that appear remarkably similar, at least from the outside. Mad or terminally ill mothers predominate, as do drug-addicted children going through detox, and Vietnam vets who never quite pulled themselves together. Thief is a young mans recollections of his adolescence, during which he responded to the trauma of a mothers mental illness through kleptomaniaeven going so far as to steal presents in order to impress girls. Animal Stories is also a sons account, this one being the reminiscence of his mothers death of a brain tumor in the summer of 1972. In Dog Lover, a heroin addict and his blind Vietnam vet fatherboth haunted by the death of the mother and wife who killed herself years agoargue religion and live unhappily together amid a litter of puppies being raised by the son. Detox portrays life inside a county detoxification center where one of the inmates plots an escape. The Coroners Report describes the daily routines of a county coroner as he trains a new employee in the art of informing survivors of the deaths of their loved ones, while the title piece relates the experiences of an ambulance driver who delivers human organs to hospitals in time (he hopes) for successful transplant operations. The Sadness of the Body proceeds in a somewhat more postmodern vein, examining in mock-medical terminology (The spleen suffers from terminally low self- esteem. It refuses to talk to the rest of the body) the physiology of an alcoholic Vietnam vet who, back in 1968, was in charge of the body count. New wine that needs aging: overwritten, ponderous, and crammed with the sorts of platitudes (It seems that what we know makes us sad and what we dont know is who we are) that only undergraduates could find profound. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047210
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047219
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,551,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tremendous debut, May 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Hardcover)

After reading the first three stories I called three friends and told them they had to get this book. Mr. Brown's imagination and diligent investigation of the psyche provide an engaging view of human reality. Not since Denis Johnson have I been so inspired by a collection of stories.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Wait..., April 2, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (English 280 in Ithaca, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Having been a former student of Mr. Brown, I remember reading some of these stories as he shared them with students. I have been waiting for this collection to come out and it has been well worth the wait. Brown is yet another in a long line of very talented young writers to come out of Cornell and Stanford! Animal Stories is my favorite, but all of the stories in this collection are intense and immensely readable. I now look forward to Brown's next collection!

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific!, March 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful collection. Even though this is a first book, the writer seems like a real craftsman. The title story--Driving the Heart--is an amazing piece of fiction. Brown puts interesting characters in these quirky situations, and the results are fantastic.