The End of the Straight and Narrow: Stories [Hardcover]

David McGlynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2008

David McGlynn's first collection takes on the inner lives of the zealous, their passions and desires, and the ways religious faith is both the compass for navigating daily life and the force that makes ordinary life impossible. From the coastal highways of Southern California to the bayous of Houston, Texas, the stories take place against the backdrop of disaster--a landslide, a fire, a drowning, a hurricane--as the characters question whether faith illuminates the world or leaves them isolated within it.

"When a young writer proves in a first collection that he is the real thing, when the stories are as riveting and haunting as David McGlynn's are, the temptation is to ask how it is possible. McGlynn writes both elegantly and deeply about the trick of salvation and the strange consolation of suffering itself, about the sorrows of the faithful and the faith that's required of the nonbeliever."--Jane Hamilton, author of When Madeline Was Young

"Whether he imagines a child whose final wish is to kill, or enters the heart and mind of a young man who blames himself for his mother's blindness, McGlynn moves with such patience and curiosity, such exquisite tenderness for his people, we feel his life and ours may hang in the balance."--Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts.

"David McGlynn's profoundly compassionate stories are sure-footed and often witty, grounded in a vision so rich and full it seems to bring extra color to the world. With these luminous stories, David McGlynn announces himself as a writer of consequence."--Erin McGraw, author of The Good Life

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McGlynn's superlatively crafted, deeply sympathetic debut story collection traces the spiritual agonies of Christians trying to make sense of their faith within the vicissitudes of human nature. Landslide takes place in Southern California, concerning two best friends in a Christian college who follow divergent paths, who both seem involved in a deadly highway landslide they witness together. In Moonland on Fire, a divorced father of three struggles to keep the peace between his visiting teenaged son and his evangelical girlfriend amid encroaching L.A. wildfires. The last five stories move the action to Houston, Tex., and come together like five facets of one novella, centered around a 15-year-old, Rowdy Jarrett, harboring crushing guilt over his mother, Cordelia, who went blind while giving birth to him and whose health is now deteriorating. As each successive story shifts points of view among the family members, their multipronged predicament moves into more well-defined but perilous territory, amounting to an affecting family parable. (Nov.)
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Review

"A collection as humbling as it is meet. I am impressed by his 'believers' whom he refuses to trivialize, categorize, or marginalize. I haven't the words to say what a wallop McGlynn laid upside my head." -- Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once

"A good book gets under your skin. A great book moves you toward wisdom. The End of the Straight and Narrow is the wisest book I've read in a very long time. This is smart, sharp, soul-testing American fiction." -- Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes

"Wonderfully controlled stories of the well-intentioned and the flawed, those precarious souls who attempt to live a moral life in an often immoral universe. McGlynn's collection is not just entertaining and memorable, but necessary." -- Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Southern Methodist University Press; 1 edition (August 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870745506
• ISBN-13: 978-0870745508
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterful Debut, September 8, 2008

By 

Kyle Minor "reader" (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: The End of the Straight and Narrow: Stories (Hardcover)

Many of our better collections of short stories have more in common with poetry than they do with the novel. They do a dazzling dance with language, and leave the reader pierced with a single knife.

For all the pleasure those kinds of story collections offer, they sometimes leave the reader unsatisfied on grounds of plot or characterization or long-term resonance. Few writers dare step into this breach and offer up stories that aspire to contain within them the whole broad world and leave in their wake (and their white space) the novel they've managed to breathe in the space of a story. Toward these ends, the writer must walk a fine line: On the one hand, the writer must waste no words, and on the other, the writer must bravely avoid making anything minimal.

The list of those who have accomplished this feat is small and formidable: Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever make the short list. To their ranks (I'm very, very pleased to have discovered), the lucky reader might add the name of David McGlynn, and his beautiful, moving, possibly earth-shattering book The End of the Straight and Narrow, a book that dares take on a much-maligned segment of middle America, render it full and true, and in the process show us something not only about the smallish world his characters inhabit, but also, by a skill I can hardly believe possible in a writer so young, show us a thing (or twenty) about what it means to be a human being living among other human beings.

SMU Press has done readers a favor, and I hope the marketplace will do its part to spread the word, because The End of the Straight and Narrow is a book that deserves a large and attentive audience, and rewards multiple readings. It sits proudly on my shelf alongside the books I plan to keep and revisit again and again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An essential collection, November 25, 2008

By 

K.L. Benjamin (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Straight and Narrow: Stories (Hardcover)

These are wonderful stories - they contain what a lot of American fiction doesn't these days: a moral spine. McGlynn's characters are good people trying to make their way through life without doing harm. They are flawed beings, just like the rest of us - and he draws them with such compassion, without judgment. His observations are very fine - he's looking where you wouldn't necessarily look - which gives the stories a freshness that is very fine too. And they have a depth, an expansiveness and generosity that makes them satisfying and memorable the way novels are. These stories feel essential.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, wow., March 10, 2009

By 

K. P. - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Straight and Narrow: Stories (Hardcover)

I read this in two days, because once I started, I had to ignore other things I had going on so I could finish.

Just because I blew through the book, though, doesn't mean that the collection is light reading; I cried most of the way through it. McGlynn has created characters that I not only know, but both sorrow and cheer for. An amazing read.

Buy this book. Seriously.