In this wise and graceful short story collection, each character is intimately linked to the land in and around Cloten, Minnesota. We meet a woman who returns home to care for her family's farm, a man whose obsession with bow hunting affects his life in complex ways, and a farmer's son who plays a dangerous game of drag-racing roulette. Light in the Crossing is a beautifully crafted portrait of the relationships people in farming towns build with one another and the land on which they depend.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Cloten, Minnesota, just might be Kent Meyers's Yoknapatawpha--his literary home ground and the center of an entire imagined universe. Life in this rural community can be brutally difficult; winters are long, farms teeter on the verge of financial collapse, and violence is never far from the surface. Meyers's debut novel, The River Warren, followed the ugly life and cataclysmic death of Two-Speed Crandall, Cloten's notorious town drunk. Several stories in Light in the Crossing explore the same territory. In "Two-Speed," Crandall's death is retold from yet another point of view, while in "Making the News," a sculptor finds himself obsessed with re-creating the fatal accident. Like a local myth, Two-Speed's life bears repeating again and again, until Cloten's inhabitants can solve the paradox of someone who makes a fine bar story but a less than fine man. Other stories follow two young men playing a dangerous game of chicken, a farmer's wife who has to shoot the family dog, and a man who learns to grieve his wife by struggling to rid his land of a stubborn shelf of rock. Read together, the individual voices in these tales blend into a communal whole--like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, the voice of Cloten by turns passes judgment and forgives. Meyers is a fine writer whose prose is as austere yet as lovely as the Minnesota prairie. But the real achievement here lies in his exploration of the ties that bind Cloten as well as the loneliness that divides it. In taking apart what makes this little town tick, Meyers shows just how complicated the simple life can be. --Chloe Byrne
From Publishers Weekly
Turbulent human emotions and the merciless natural world color Meyers's collection of 12 stories of rural life, set in Catheresque Cloten, S.D. An intriguing tale, "The Smell of the Deer," reworks the myth of Actaeon, giving us a sense of atavistic forces underlying the small town order. Jerrod Sinclair, who is so at home in nature that he can track deer by smell, is seduced by a mysterious woman he meets in the woods. When he returns to the woods the following spring, married, his lover spurns him, and Jerrod eventually dies of the disappointment. His widow, Sara, is then befriended by a newcomer, an "ageless" woman named Diane (read Diana), who buys Sara a puppy, which leads indirectly to Sara's gruesome end. The title story concerns two teenage boys who spend one summer playing a complicated version of chicken with their cars on country roads. Tony, the boy who suggests the game, and Robert, the narrator, are drawn by that troubling alchemy of adolescent friendships, the unsettling bond of family tensions. In "Bird Shadows" an unnamed daughter returns to her father's farm after her divorce. She wants the land, but her father intends to sell it. In his mind, it is cursed, the place where his father jumped from a silo. For her it is a refuge. The account of their crossed purposes is neatly embedded in the story of how the father originally chose the farm over the woman he loved best, and the regret he still feels. Myers (The River Warren) gives voice to the unreconciled oppositions of country lifeAits solid satisfactions and its sometimes unbearable narrownessAin these harsh, strongly felt stories. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories of rural lives, well told,
By A Customer
This review is from: Light in the Crossing: Stories (Hardcover)
A fine and very satisfying collection of stories with a strong sense of place (southern Minnesota) and the people who inhabit it. Meyers' stories represent the narrative tradition found in "Winesburg, Ohio" and "The Spoon River Anthology." He has a gift for capturing the way rural Midwesterners speak, and each of the stories is a dramatic monologue in a distinctly different voice. He also has a remarkable ability to evoke in words the experience of physical sensations -- qualities of air and movement, nuances of deeply felt emotion and memory. There are frequent references to the topography of the land and the traces left behind of geological ages past. This awareness of prehistory and the cycles of seasons, migratory birds, and extremes of weather, frame the lives of characters who live and work in rural communities and on family farms. A young man is struck by lightning while operating a combine. A crew boss at a corn processing plant must deflect the mounting rage of an itinerant employee. A young woman struggles with her father to hang onto a farm he no longer wants. A young farmer restores a section of his cornfields to wetlands, so geese will stop again on their seasonal flights. Two bored teenagers invent a death-defying game played out nightly on country roads. Although often haunted by isolation, loss, and regret, these are richly experienced lives, lived by people reminded daily of their vulnerability by the vast, open land around them and their dependence on one another.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A benchmark of good reading,
This review is from: Light in the Crossing: Stories (Paperback)
This is a great book of stories. I like to read before bedtime in the evenings, and usually I take several evenings to finish a single story. However, with this book, I found myself wanting to read more than one story in an evening.
I use a benchmark to decide whether or not a story is good. If I keep thinking about it for hours (or days) afterwards, that means it was a good read. The stories in this book produced images that stand out so vividly that, in memory, it is as if I saw them in a movie or even in real life ... the boy charred by lightning, dangling from the windrower as it goes round and round ... the deer carcasses hanging from trees in the night. No other author has produced lingering images in my mind that are any more vivid than those generated by these stories. The only other author who did as good a job of that (for me) was Isaac Bashevis Singer. I've had the opportunity to meet Kent Meyers in person. He gave a talk for Northern Hills Writers, our little group here in Lead, South Dakota. It's amazing how much effort he puts into his work, and it has paid off in this collection of stories. Reading Kent's work is not, however, a lazy affair. Your mind's eye must be open.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Things not said,
By
This review is from: Light in the Crossing: Stories (Paperback)
This is my 3rd Kent Meyers book and I can't recommend them highly enough. What a writer! His works are as emotionally jarring as those by Chuck Palahniuk without all the violence and the craziness. This is a book of short stories and each one packs a wallop.
One of my favorites was "Abiding by Law" which speaks to the universality of human emotions, our fear of the unknown and love for the safe and familiar, the strong drive to protect those in our family. This story has a wonderful aha moment, when a man's protective shell is cracked by a smile and a bow, a gentle nudge from one of those amazing people who are able to form bridges between people, and he is able to reach out a helping hand to his neighbor. In "Making the News" a farmer creates sculptures out of cars. "We were in the grove. Mammouths Resurrected come into view. Ed'd turned three cars into mammoths, put thick legs and trunks on them, and tusks,and he'd half-buried one so it looked like it was climbing out of the earth, and the second one was leaping like it'd just shook free, and the third was in full run, its trunk raised. From a distance they really did look like mammoths. The rock pile of all the rocks Ed's father and Ed and Gray had picked out of the fields was in the center of the group, and second mammoth looked like she was leaping over it, her front legs curled up for the leap. 'I don't see how he does it,' Paul Alcorn said. 'Everywhere you turn, there's something new.' We stood looking at the sculpture, the wind making light scatter through the trees. 'It's like he's trying to bring it all back,' Paul Alcorn said. 'That's what it feels like. Everything that ever happened here. Everything that's lost, he's trying to retrieve it.'"
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