Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories [Hardcover]

Ellen Slezak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

A first collection of interconnected stories by an award-winning writer with a distinctive voice and an unerring sense of place.

The stories in this affecting debut collection are populated by the sober, self effacing members of Detroit’s Polish-Catholic working class. Linked by place and characters, the stories create a world that feels both familiar and strange, where religion is a way of life, and traditions are carried down through the generations. But even this isolated community cannot remain immutable. In these wonderfully poignant and witty stories based on people and places she knows well, Ellen Slezak documents the colorful clash of young and old, of religious and secular, of traditional values and the temptations of the flesh. Like Winesburg, Ohio, Last Year’s Jesus creates a fully realized world teetering on the brink of change. Writing with tremendous empathy, warmth, and humor, Slezak brings to life the sights and sounds of a place she calls home -- a place readers won’t soon forget.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her collection Last Year's Jesus, Ellen Slezak seems to take an almost defiant interest in her bleak hometown of Detroit. Her stories are peopled by marginal folks--a widow who runs a junk shop, an 11-year-old girl often left at home alone, a man diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. The protagonist in "Here in Car City" opens a European-style pension in the inner city against all advice, and Slezak seems to share her character's perverse determination not to give up on this tough town and its tough people. Several Motor City themes weave together in the novella "Head, Heart, Legs, or Arms," set against the backdrop of the 1967 Detroit race riots. In a dark panorama that recalls Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, a young girl endures the riots as she follows the Tigers's pennant race on her transistor radio. Her older sister attends the University of Michigan, where a serial killer is stalking the co-eds; her younger sister lies dying in the hospital. Slezak captures the way historical events play out in ordinary life: "On the sixth day of the riots, Aunt Jenny made meat loaf for dinner. Mona watched as she mixed together sticky raw meat, egg yolks, bread crumbs, and chopped onion, which Mona particularly didn't like." Never mind the carnage; when you're 11, it's the onions that really get to you. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

Don't be fooled by the playful title: the Polish-Catholic working class in Detroit and its environs, as depicted in Slezak's debut collection, is a largely gloomy heritage. Fractured families, alcoholism, dead-end jobs and above all a tendency toward inertia keep Slezak's characters rooted in a city of "busted-up businesses" or in "dull and modest" Michigan towns. In the best and liveliest stories, acerbic first-person voices puncture the malaise, such as when awkward college student Theresa Jagielski takes readers through a twist on a morality play that probes race and generational differences with subtle irony in the title story. In "Here in Car City," a young woman who opens the Pensione Detroit (an "inexpensive European-style hotel") in a run-down neighborhood forges an unforgettable bond with an industrious Polish hustler, and "If You Treat Things Right" showcases the bitter, knowing sass of middle-aged Jenny, a lifelong auto-plant worker contending with her sister's embarrassing infatuation with a college boy. Third-person narration serves Slezak less well; the remaining stories, though admirably loaded with details of Detroit's urban blight and the inner workings of its primary struggling industry, begin to suffer from a tonal and thematic sameness (dead or dying siblings, for example, are featured in three of the 10 stories). Such careful layering both authenticates the material and dulls the senses. Readers who have been missing gritty realism will find something to latch onto here, and the choice of place which Slezak renders vividly is both familiar and foreign enough to attract.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Theia; 1 edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786867418
• ISBN-13: 978-0786867417
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,728,475 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars JESUS OF HAMTRAMCK, June 3, 2002

By 

Tom (Formerly of Warren/Sterling Heights, MI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories (Hardcover)

This collection of short stories is startling in it's ability to capture what life is like in Southeastern Michigan... Especially if you have any fondness for or familiarity with the working class Detroit suburbs or Polish-American culture. I just read "Tomato Watch" and I wasn't able to sleep until I wrote this review. It's not just the ethnic angle, Slezak also captures the - the what? the malaise? the trapped, depressed feeling? - that young people who grow up in Detroit's suburbs often have. In many ways, the thirty year old heroine of "Tomato Watch" is as trapped as her ninety-five year old Polish grandfather... Incredible... I left that world twenty years ago and this book brought it all back... To capture all that in one short story just knocks me out.

Her style of writing also has this great subtle sarcasm, this vague sorrow, this fatalistic bitterness that can be seen in works by other Michigan-based or Michigan-influenced writers: Check out anything by Michael Moore, Elmore Leonard, A. M. Wellman or even Loren Estlemen...

If you're from that part of the world, or just want to sample how strange your life would be if you were, "Last Year's Jesus" is a remarkable experience. (Just read "Tomato Watch," first)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A moving look into the lives of everyday people, June 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories (Hardcover)

I think that Slezak's new book is a unique collection of short stories that capture the essence of not-so-every day American life. Throughout the book her characters offered an unresolved glimpse into real-life pain, the struggles had from children to older adults are all based in the very specific setting of the Detroit area, (which reminded me in some ways of "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson). The stories in this book have a unique way of revealing humour, fear, pain, anger through complex situations... and weave in and out of these situations just long enough to allow these characters to enter into our imaginations (and possibly our hearts). I would almost love to read a sequel to see what happens to the boy whose mother left him, and who has to live with an unwelcoming father and stepmother. Or the woman who looks after her senile grandfather, who grows closer to him as he helplessly drifts farther from reality.

I think Slezak has true talent and craft as a writer. I really appreciate her approach towards unconventional endings, and her interest in revealing the darker sides of every day life.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories about people who've seen their world change, November 13, 2003

By 

A.Carole (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories (Paperback)

Reading Ellen Slezak's collection of short sotries, I kept thinking how different Detroit was from where I grew up. There's plenty of vivid detail in this solid, unpretentious prose to give a visitor an inside look at a Polish-American working class suburb. Enough to make me feel like I'd been out of town - somewhere I'd never visited before.

The feelings evoked, though, were familiar. The characters never behave like stick figures or glossed-over personalities meant to be played by movie or sitcom actors. Their stories are interesting because they inhabit a specific time and place, but they have the sort of problems and insecurities and unlikely ambitions a lot of us have. More than a few have the quirky familiarity of your closest relatives, the ones you neglect until, years later, you recognize them in something you've done and wonder how they are, how they're getting along - because it wasn't obvious at the time, but those were the people you learned from the most. Not because they were especially wise. They were real.

I think these stories are very good. Like some of the best fiction, they're about people who've seen their world change, one era passing into the next, and they're coping with it - more or less.