Girl Trouble: Stories (P.S.) [Paperback]

Holly Goddard Jones (Author)

Book Description

Series: P.S. | Publication Date: September 1, 2009

In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.

A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman refIects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The eight stories in this debut collection maintain a sense of isolation and loss while depicting and dissecting the lives of drifting characters making questionable decisions in a quiet Kentucky town. In the title piece, a father is faced with a moral quandary when his 19-year-old son is accused of raping a local teenager. The others follow similar themes of emotional voids and gaps in trust. In Upright Man, a college-bound town kid, Matt, befriends large and muscular and handsome country-boy Robbie while doing manual labor the summer after graduation. Though Robbie helps Matt get his first girlfriend, Matt secretly desires Robbie's girl and discovers how easily betrayal overcomes good intentions. The strongest entries are Parts and Proof of God, opposite sides of the same tale, narrated in turn by the mother who loses her daughter in a horrific crime, and the college classmate who killed her. Throughout each, the fallible characters are handled with delicate honesty. Though the setting tends to feel repetitive, Jones writes with grace and ease, the selections adding up to a powerful sum of reflection, loss and regret. (Sept.)
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Review

“Powerful . . . Strong, subtly nuanced.” (The News & Observer )

“A grand debut of a writer who is assured, sensitive, and wonderfully skillful. . . . A marvelous work of heartbreaking wisdom.” (Edward P. Jones )

“GIRL TROUBLE is a powerful, resonant short story collection from the uniquely talented Holly Goddard Jones.” (George Pelecanos )

“Jones’ sparkling debut collection zeroes in on lonely searching souls making do in a quiet Kentucky town.” (People )

“Girl Trouble resonates with black-coal sorrow and dark truths found in [Jones’s] native state’s darkest hollers. . . . Nothing is contrived; every story is steeped in reality, and clarity comes with a price.” (The Nashville Scene )

“Jones writes with grace and ease, the selections adding up to a powerful sum of reflection, loss and regret.” (Publishers Weekly )

“This masterful debut dramatizes the fortitude of small-town southerners confronting situations gone terribly wrong and the shadowed boundaries of love, morality, and violence. . . . Jones’ seemingly effortless style makes the eight tales quietly powerful and achingly human.” (Booklist )

“Gritty, eloquent dispatches from the heartland. . . . Jones’ hauntingly accomplished language lifts the mundane to the level of profound tragedy.” (Chicago Tribune )

“Holly Goddard Jones is blessed with wisdom beyond her years, a gimlet eye, and an enviable literary talent; her debut collection, GIRL TROUBLE, is a fierce and exhilarating achievement.” (Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children )

“Jones exposes a world that is darkly seductive.” (Oxford American )

“No politician should ever again use the phrase ‘The American People’ without reading this book, preferably twice, so that they understand at last just who the hell they’re talking about. Holly Goddard Jones has a voice as expansive, complex, and beautiful as the country itself.” (Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End )

“The stories from Girl Trouble are poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch-perfect. . . . Sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America’s great Southern writers.” (Las Vegas Weekly )

“Poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch perfect. . . . Jones’ prose is also sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America’s great Southern writers.” (New York Press )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061776300
• ISBN-13: 978-0061776304
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #455,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Holly Goddard Jones was born and raised in western Kentucky, the setting for most of her fiction. Her short stories have appeared in NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH, BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES, and various literary journals. In 2007 she was honored with a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, she has taught at Denison University, the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, Murray State University, and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives there with her husband, Brandon, and two dogs, Bishop and Martha. Visit www.hollygoddardjones.com to learn more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gold Standard of Short Story Collections, September 9, 2009

By 

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

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Girl Trouble: Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)

Girl Trouble reads less like a first book of short stories by a young writer than it does like a sixth or seventh book of short stories by an old master. Here you will find no fancy tricks of language or form. Instead you will find a pleasing and plainspoken account of the interior lives of men and women intelligent enough to warrant stories as richly rendered as these. Jones is a master of the difficult machinations of the close third person point of view, and as we upshift and downshift the distance between the exterior world of the telling and the interior world of the teller, we do it so seamlessly that we're hardly aware we're doing it at all, and the effect upon the reader is an extraordinary immersion in the character in the midst of his or her place, which here isn't a pile of sticks and rocks and dirt, but is instead a way of being in the working class world of western Kentucky, where, if these stories are to be trusted, the people are fierce, generally good-hearted, and inclined to do the things they know will undo them, knowing full well their deeds will undo them, because they are somehow or other compelled, the way all of us sooner or later are, to whatever degree.

Most of these stories wrap themselves around some high event: a violent act, a glimpse at the shocking, a life-altering memory. But the stories are not lurid or Gothic in any sense. This isn't Flannery O'Connor. The preoccupation of the stories, instead, is a long and steady gaze at what reckonings with the extraordinary will do to ordinary people, and how they do and don't settle back into their lives in the aftermath.

A couple of the stories (notably "Life Expectancy") read like what most often finds its way into Best American Short Stories: the multi-crotted single movement story with an epiphanic ending. But the broader impulse of the collection is toward a deeper complication, a move away from adherence to the Aristotelian Unities and toward a more layered and textured and less time-bound narrative -- the kind of story we're used to seeing from late-model Alice Munro. The effect is extraordinary, and the stories that achieve it deserve a second look to see how Jones manipulates time and structure, and interplays scene and exposition. It's also sort of a miracle the way she lands these stories. The reader feels as though he or she has read a novel -- no small achievement.

One last thing worth mentioning: In some of the reviews that have already appeared here at Amazon.com, and also in other outlets, the reviewer has given Girl Trouble high praise but complained that all the stories are set in the same place. This doesn't make any sense to me. (Would one complain that an entire novel is set in the same place?) Reading these stories, there isn't really anything much repetitive except the worldview of many of the characters, particularly the fatherly figures, which with some exceptions seem mostly of a piece, and which are to some degree romanticized (but not so much that it undermines the story -- these aren't cartoon characters, they're fully rendered characters that are complicated enough to satisfy even an itchy reader like me.) But the stories are remarkably varied in their attention to event, in their structural and point of view strategies, in their lengths, in the ways in which they construct meaning. Place serves as an anchor and a unifier. It's true: This is a book, not just a random assemblage of this and that part. The stories speak to one another, and they are intelligently ordered and assembled. The reader can construct a narrative throughline from beginning to end, and where characters from one story appear in another, there is a further amplification of pleasure.

If you enjoy reading books, and you don't have time to read very many, Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones is one that is well worth your time.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not "Chick Lit", April 29, 2010

By 

Mike Burrell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Girl Trouble: Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)

Discovering a writer whose work I really admire is one of those sweet little things that make life worth living. I'm happy to say I've found another one of those sweet little things with Girl Trouble. The only quibble I have with the book (and it's a very, very small quibble since I actually like the cover and have always enjoyed a moderate amount of girl trouble when I could find it ) is the title combined with the cover and the fact that the author is a woman at first gives the impression that this book might be "chick lit." Believe me, Girl Trouble is not "chick lit." In fact, it's as far from being "chick lit" as the 64 year old man writing this review is from being a chick.

Though definitely not "chick lit" (not that there's anything wrong with "chick lit"), there are a number of strong, well imagined female characters in Girl Trouble. For example, Libby in "Retrospective," who, upon hearing that her ex husband is going to build a new home on the land where she once lived with him, begins looking back upon a marriage that ran off the tracks years ago. Libby is portrayed so well in this story, I felt I was reading about a neighbor who lives down the street from me. Then there is Dana in "Parts," who narrates the story and pulled me inside her own private hell after the murder of her daughter. But my favorite female character in this book is the tender-hearted thirteen year old, Ellen, in "Theory of Realty." The mounting tension in this story is palpable as Ellen's sweet nature makes her extremely vulnerable to making decisions that could ruin the rest of her life.

But what is amazing about this book is the male characters. They appear so real on the page, I couldn't help but wonder how the young woman whose picture graces the back cover could know so much about men. How could she imagine how it feels to be Jacob in "Good Girl," a man with his best years behind him and his wife dead, having a chance to heal his wounds in the arms of a good woman as he tries to clean up the debris left by the sociopathic son he raised? Or Theo Burk, a high school girls' basketball coach, on the brink of disaster because he is having an affair with, or worse, has fallen in love with, one of his students--the wonderfully self-centered and fickle Josie (Whoa, talk about girl trouble). In "Proof of God," the author not only probes the psyche of Simon Wells, the murderer of Dana's daughter in "Parts," but traces his background and the chain of events that inextricably led to the senseless killing.

Another thing I liked about Girl Trouble is the fact that the stories are fairly long ones (thirty or forty pages) in which something actually happens that transforms the lives of the very believable characters that inhabit the book. I can't wait to see the world this writer will create in the space of a two to three-hundred page novel. Well, I guess I'll have to wait. But I'll sure be on the lookout for it. And when it comes, I know it will be sweet.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Debut Fiction by an Extraordinary Talent, September 28, 2009

By 

Jude NYC (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Girl Trouble: Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)

The stories in Girl Trouble grabbed me by the shoulders and made my heart quicken in a way that no single short story has done in a very long time. Holly Goddard Jones is a young writer whose deep sensitivity, empathy and generosity belie her years. Every one of the stories in this collection is imbued with such startling wisdom and insight, but especially heartbreaking were "Good Girl," "Parts," "Retrospective" and "Allegory of a Cave." One question posed by the ex-husband to his ex-wife in "Parts" actually brought tears to my eyes, as did several lines and scenes in "Good Girl" and "Retrospective."

These stories have such a richness and scope to them that they often give the impression of a novel rather than a short story. This is deep, emotional writing that can't help but affect you as it plumbs the depths of grief and loneliness and despair, as it portrays the loss of innocence. While the characters in Girl Trouble are small-town folk, they speak to denizens of both the small town and the big city, as many of them lead lives compromised by compromise, and their passions, though quiet, come across loud and clear to us--heartwrenchingly so.

I could continue with this gushing, but let's leave it at this: Goddard-Jones has something to say, and we are much the better for listening.