Customer Reviews

Wet Places at Noon (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lee K. Abbott's stories have the taste of cognac, VSOP: heady,yet smooth. They tingle through the body, letting us know we'realive. And, if I may continue to extend this metaphor, Abbott gets better with age.

His style pulls us in gently, is of the kind that is familiar. It's the voice of our own lives, has the beat of our hearts in its rhythm, is of who we are. We know because of the honesty in it.

In the sixth story of this new collection, "As Fate Would Have It," the main character, Noley, is confronted by fate with who he is--the man who can't land a punch, makes a fool of himself and ends up not with the woman he believes is his true love, but with "Miss Congeniality." In the end Nolely faces the truth of his life. No matter how much he (or we) may wish otherwise, it's unavoidable. This story, written in second person future subjunctive mode, is one of those rarest of gems: a perfect story. Each word is used without waste, the setting, the characters, the circumstance, all contribute exactly as they should. And the tense, what wraps the story together in it's perfect package, is what truly hits us--the punch that even as the one Noley throws in the story misses Slate, hits us square where it counts. Hard.

Each story, each moment in Wet Places at Noon is deftly rendered, written to bring us in tightly to it. Each holds us. Abbott's are the kind of stories that must be savored--the emotions he exacts (and extracts) from us demand that. These are the kind of stories that are important for us to read. They make us look at, and feel deeply, the humanness of us.

The eight stories in Wet Places At Noon are struggles of the heart, struggles with ourselves, us confronting us. Dare we look? Yes. We must. Lee Abbott shows us how.

Some of these stories are not in Abbott's newest collection, one of which is the humorous and unforgettable "A Creature Out of Palestine." The first two pages introduce us to the world Abbott has created, characters speaking with his strength and natural humor, the landscape and characters as unique as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, but in the desert of the American southwest. When I first read Abbott, I thought, "Wonderful. Who IS this guy?" Answer: an original, and per William Giraldi in "The Georgia Review", "Abbott fuses a poet's purpose with a fiction writer's, the lyrical with the narrative...[but it would be] impossible to sustain that level of stylistic fervor, those orgasms of language for more than twenty or twenty-five pages." The limitation of length in the short story challenges a writer to create a world peopled with three dimensional characters in conflict, and yet to make the story whole, with synergy. Abbott is the master, doing so with beauty, pathos, and most especially, humor.

Lee K. Abbott is the King of Kings and the true heir to John Cheever's crown as the ruler of the short story as Big Art. I once phoned him while doing a stage at the University of Iowa International Writers Workshop and he promised to send me "The Heart Never Fits its Wanting" (his only title I didn't have); he never did but it's okay: still looking for it and proud to be his only fan born in Argentina.

Simply THE BEST. Every book by Lee K. Abbott reads like a chapter in a BIG AMERICAN NOVEL. I mean: each one of his short-stories is more nutritive than most novels published these days. I already wrote a review as a READER FROM BARCELONA, SPAIN but forget to put my e-mail there in case Mr. Abbott wants to send me the promised out-of-print-book (if you're there, Lee, knock three times). In a world where everybody seems to fall for minimalists, Mr. Abbott is a maximalist with a vengeance. Lucky us.

Simply THE BEST. Every book by Lee K. Abbott reads like a chapter in a BIG AMERICAN NOVEL. I mean: each one of his short-stories is more nutritive than most novels published these days. I already wrote a review as a READER FROM BARCELONA, SPAIN. In a world where everybody seems to fall for minimalists, Mr. Abbott is a maximalist with a vengeance. Lucky us.

Lee K. Abbott is the King of Kings and the true heir to John Cheever's crown as the ruler of the short story as Big Art. I once phoned him while doing a stage at the University of Iowa International Writers Workshop and he promised to send me "The Heart Never Fits its Wanting" (his only title I didn't have); he never did but it's okay: still looking for it and proud to be his only fan born in Argentina.

Hi - I'm the illustrator that did the cover. Had to read the whole manuscript first - Lee's a sweetly demented fellow, his tales of full of sadness, regret and wicked observation.

Had to get a drunk a couple of times just to start work on the cover art.

Lee - you never said whether you liked the cover or not?