First, Body [Hardcover]

Melanie Rae Thon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 1997

In praise of her first story collection, Girls in the Grass, the New York Times wrote, " Melanie Rae Thon belts out her short stories in a tone and style reminiscent of classic blues singers . . . The reader is swept along not only by her remarkable characterizations but also by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch. " Thon brings to her new collection all the emotional intensity and vibrant lyricism that marked her first, in stories that are both dazzling and unsettling. In the title story, chosen by Jane Smiley for The Best American Short Stories 1995, a 326-pound woman in a Seattle morgue pins a Vietnam vet to the floor. A young girl in Florida reveals the secret dangers of her privileged life: alligators and furious ducks, a crippled grandfather, a burning car. Taking us from the cobblestoned streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, Thon's stories transport us to the borderlands, to the places where sudden accidents and misguided pa

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Two nurses with scissors could make a man naked in eleven seconds." The first sentence of the first story from this collection grabs you and offers an insightful metaphor for all that is to come. With dark and seductive prose, Thon strips away the surface of her characters to get to the raw heart of being. Her characters' lives are edged with pain, addiction, loneliness, and dire circumstances. Sex is an act of survival, drugs less a matter of choice than necessity, human contact less an act of intimacy than a jostling for position. And Thon dumps you right into the middle of these desperate lives, graced only with her lyrical and searching voice. Although it's a slender collection, barely more than 150 pages, it hits you hard--you'll want to catch your breath after each story. Granta has declared Thon to be among the best young American novelists, and this collection does not belie the accolades.

From Publishers Weekly

Thon (Iona Moon), who made the final cut of Granta's list of the Best Young American Novelists, peoples the seven incandescent stories in her new collection with characters who have nothing more to lose. They are numbly hanging on to life, absorbed by the ache of memories and regrets. Whether they live in Seattle, rural Montana, Boston or Florida, most of them are on the precipice of despair, with no possessions except their bodies, which they destroy with alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. In "Nobody's Daughters," a starved, cold, homeless 14-year-old black girl named Nadine listens to the voice of her dead sister, who both guides her and tempts her to steal. Wearing her victims' clothes enables Nadine to imagine herself into their lives for a while, to try to find the love her mother has withheld. ER worker Sid Elliot, the protagonist of the title story, learned about death in Vietnam; lonely, alcoholic but determined to redeem his dignity, he makes a bad decision and becomes trapped beneath the body of a 326-pound woman in the hospital morgue. Others here also make bad choices and regret them immediately and eternally, but ultimately bad choices are the only ones open to them. The body is a prison for these characters, who long to burst free into new physical entities with different opportunities, different parents, different lovers. Their corporal reality is ironic because they feel faceless, invisible, hollow?forever denied the reviving touch of love. Thon has a dark, fierce imagination expressed in a torrential sweep of words. If cumulatively these tales present a near-surfeit of intense, fevered interior monologues that crest in high-pitched hallucinatory scenes, if the quotient of pervasive angst becomes a bit overpowering, the stories nonetheless leave an indelible impression of heartbreaking truth. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 165 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 3rd edition (January 9, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039578588X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395785881
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,550,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget to breathe!, August 26, 2000

By 

Mary Z. Cox (Tallahassee, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: First, Body: Stories (Paperback)

I forget to breathe when I read this book. It's not just the voice and the characters--but the language that leaves me breathless. Her stories of homeless teens leave me frightened but I cannot get the scenes she paints out of my mind. Melanie Rae is good--very good--she is as graphic as Robert Morgan--maybe more. The only time I feel I'm reading stories of the same calibre of writing is when I read Annie Proulx. First body is powerful and you should not miss this book if you are a writer.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practices What She Preaches, March 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: First, Body (Hardcover)

I completed a couple of Ms. Thon's workshops when she lived in Cambridge, MA. She was always stressing the voice of the character rather than the story. Teaching me that the characters will tell their own stories. In her latest collection, Melanie's characters tell and show us more than they ever have in previous works

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unique voice, April 2, 2002

By 

"siammuse" - See all my reviews

This review is from: First, Body (Hardcover)

First, body is a slim book of ten short stories...each one flowing or shall I say crashing into the next like something untamed, unmanagable.

Thon's writing is atmospheric...bringing the reader into a world of darkness, drugs, sex, and booze. I found my heart quickening, felt a sense of urgency; at times I wanted to quit reading but I could not.

"I know I am strange. I drift. Maybe I'm smoking a cigarette, leaning on the bricks. Somebody's talking. Then I'm not there. I'm a window breaking. I'm peices of myself falling to
the ground." -----Nobody's Daughters------

First, Body takes the reader into places we don't want to go...but we go anyway...It reveals other worlds we don't want to know about...but we listen.

We want to believe we live in a perfect world, but reading this book helps us crack open our little cozy cocoon....and we are forced to fly into the reality of it all.

Thon's prose is more like poetry...Intense and beautiful. I could almost smell the stale cigarettes and whiskey filling my bedroom, hear the sound of ice rolling around in a glass.

But I am still trying to figure out if I liked the stories or not! My suggestion....Read it and form your own opinion...Thon's voice alone is worth the trip to the book store.