Ice Age [Hardcover]

Robert Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 2000

The ten stories in Robert Anderson's debut collection are an inventive and daring foray into the world of the absurd. Leading us across a wide range of settings, from rural Texas to 1930s Spain to a Gulf War Weld hospital, Anderson shifts our view of the world to incorporate a set of characters slightly off-center and intriguing in their eccentricity. As he casts his writer's spyglass over their atypical lives, they begin to seem natural, universal, almost the norm. Anderson tempts us further to believe his sometimes harrowing vision by incorporating some well-known personalities from our time.

In the opening story, "Mother Tongue," Anderson merges fact and fiction to penetrate novelist Norman Mailer's psyche. In "Death and the Maid," a Texas family earns $300 per body from the county to bury vagrants and prisoners next to their home. In other stories, Jimi Hendrix makes his posthumous return to Los Angeles and Leonard Bernstein receives a letter from Catherine of Siena. A woman held prisoner beneath an unspecified American metropolis is rescued amid frenzied media attention but refuses to leave her sanctuary. As we are tossed from one bizarre circumstance to the next, Anderson's sophisticated, sometimes playful prose combines the concrete with the surreal to convince us that we know very little about the world we complacently inhabit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this challenging, eclectic debut collection of 10 stories turns the world as we know it inside out. Highly inventive and sometimes downright audacious, the stories range in setting from New York City and L.A. to Barcelona, featuring recognizable characters in twisted and absurd situations as well as real-life personalities like Norman Mailer, Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Bernstein caught in surreal time warps. Closest to a traditional, O'Connoresque story is "Dead and the Maid," in which a white-trash Texas woman holds on to the last of her land by accepting $300 per body from the state to bury vagrants and prisoners. Engaging in a long one-sided conversation with a Mrs. Buxton, her first state-executed guest: "She apologized for taking up the better part of the day getting Mrs. Buxton 'settled in' and particularly for the three-hour wait in the tractor shedAher pastor was undergoing therapy for pedophilia." In a beautifully executed dramatic monologue, "The Name of the Dead," the widow of a disgraced mobster talks to a bartender about the past, evidently still longing to be the insider she once was. The language throughout is lush and poetic: "They drove off in their squat, armadillo-faced trucks, leaving the stripes of their desertion in the sand," and "Where she stepped down off of the pine porch, there was only the red earth and its spitefulness nettled the bottoms of her bare feet." Some of the longer stories are less accessible, and their plots even more bizarre, but Anderson's sophisticated manipulation of language and narrative leave the reader breathless, if occasionally slightly confused. (Sept.) FYI: the publisher has informed PW that Ice Age is now a November release.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Try to imagine a writer with equal parts Will Self, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett. Impossible? True. But Anderson comes close with his absurd situations rendered through biting satire and each story inhabiting a surreal landscape. The opening story, "Mother Tongue," is a ride in the psyche of literature's favorite bad boy, Norman Mailer. It's like a reader's (or young writer's) vividly feverish Mailer dream based on a few famed anecdotes and notorious personality traits--didn't he knife one of his wives, wasn't he a brawler, and so forth. In "Schism," Anderson's exploration of what we think it means to be a saint or a martyr is eerily realized in the story build around Catherine of Siena and Leonard Bernstein. It's a high-wire act that doesn't always succeed in the 10 stories of this Flannery O'Connor Award winner, but when it does, it's just splendid. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (October 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820322431
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322438
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,377,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pick A World, August 1, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Ice Age (Hardcover)

Ice Age, is both a collection of 10 stories and the debut of Author Mr. Robert Anderson. The jacket suggests that this writer is taking readers into the world of the absurd, and mixing the concrete of reality with the surreal. I would normally find that type of description to be pretentious and obscure, an attempt to infuse meaning into work where there is none. Such is not the case with this work. I put this book down many, many times, however the parts I believe I understood eventually took me in.

This is the type of book that I would love to hear the Author read from and explain what he wanted his readers to glean from his words. I want to emphasize that I normally have no interest in this sort of work, and to the extent I, understood, the Author I probably understood very little. This is not light reading and you must force yourself through passages that seem nothing more than collections of meaningless wordplay. However this man can write.

Religion, life, death, and time are common elements among the 10 tales. The stories vary in their intensity, and more than one are very hard edged in their use of language and stereotypes. It is actually hard to comment on these, as it would not get posted here.

To give an idea of what awaits the reader, the final story, like a few others, contains a person from real life, in this case Jimi Hendrix. If the idea of Hendrix visiting Los Angeles as he contemplates his recent death sounds interesting, that is just the start. Now imagine Hendrix with a Mother Superior breaking down the looking-glass reality we call life, and Hendrix then taking calls on a sort of 1-800-help line. He doles off advice and wisdom while laying out Tarot Card Hands and interpreting for the caller. This is just a small section of the story, and if it appeals, you will love the balance.

This type of writing in my opinion walks a very fine line from experimenting with the absurd, and only being absurd. This Author stays on the legitimate side of the line, with some lapses that are either beyond me, or are just abstract word art.

A very unusual read, which is very worthwhile if only to experience a very different genre of work.