8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a Georgia OKeeffe painting put to words, December 15, 2003
This review is from: Red Ant House: Stories (Paperback)
These stories of drifting, down-and-out, disenfranchised characters searching for redemption read with the bleakness of the landscape of one of Georgia O'Keeffe's Southwestern paintings - which is no coincidence as that is the setting. The circumstances of each of these stories are odd, a fact that adds to their drawing power. We get to peek behind the scenes within a hypnotist's trailer as well as within the mind of a child waiting to meet a man who may be a pedophile.
Author Cummings' stories take place in the realm of endless deserts and bleached skies, and her brilliant prose sears with the power of a relentless sun.
Super-fine.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid, Sturdy Stories From a Genuinely Talented Writer, May 29, 2003
This review is from: Red Ant House: Stories (Paperback)
Ann Cummins sets most of the twelve stories in her debut collection, RED ANT HOUSE, in small desert towns and reservation communities that dot the American Southwest --- locales surrounded by "miles and miles of sand" and not much else. This extreme setting, which she evokes through tactile details, informs almost every aspect of the book, creating an atmosphere of hostile uncertainty, determining the course of characters' actions, affecting and even invading them: "The inside of the cab felt like sand, and so did the inside of her mouth," Cummins writes in "Headhunter." "The tops of her arms had separated into hundreds of little lines, and her hand, when she touched it to her tongue, tasted like salt . . . The absence of moisture gave the landscape an edge, like glass."
Cummins, who studied and now teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University, uses this jagged terrain to create tension in her stories and evoke the desolation of its inhabitants. She renders this landscape in rough-hewn prose that bursts with short, targeted sentences and blunt declarations of brutal insights. The result is a collection of textured stories that are shorn of all unnecessary words and details: they are rangy but precise, unpredictable but seemingly ineluctable.
Several of the stories here, including "Bitterwater" and the standout "Trapeze," are about whites living on reservations, "company people" who feel like outsiders and who chafe at the wide-open boredom of the desert. They feel constantly on their guard, never at home in their own homes, and always looking beyond the horizon for a means of escape.
Theirs is an anywhere-but-here mentality. In the short "Dr. War Is a Voice on the Phone," Dina abandons her sick aunt and her uncle snoring in his chair to join a man who called her out of the blue. For her, strangers like Dr. War are preferable to family, and the unknown --- despite its threats and dangers --- is more attractive than the known.
Cummins writes persuasively about this need for escape, which is strongest and most artfully pronounced in the stories narrated by young girls just reaching or still suffering through adolescence, frightened by the demands of adulthood and the larger world. In "Where I Work," a young woman cherishes her new apartment and dreams about how she will furnish it, yet she cannot hold down a job to pay for it. In "Bitterwater," Brenda rushes into a teenage marriage to a Todacheene Indian named Manny, only to watch him grow from an idealistic young man into a jaded drunk.
"Whatever's happening inside you," a cancer-ridden mother tells her son, Peter, in "Crazy Yellow," "remember that you are about to change. If you feel like you're in a well, you're about to climb out of it. That's the nature of life." She doesn't warn him, however, about the terrors that await him on the surface. Left alone while his mother undergoes more tests, Peter stirs up more trouble for himself than he could imagine. The tragic inevitability of climbing out of that well makes this and the other stories in RED ANT HOUSE so devastating.
Ultimately, these characters long for "one sweet moment" away from the world and all its troubles. Few of them get to enjoy it, but their dreams of something more than the wasteland around them enliven these solid, sturdy stories and reveal Cummins as a genuinely talented and immensely sensitive writer.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, moving, intense collection, April 21, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Red Ant House: Stories (Paperback)
If you like impeccable prose combined with the dark details that make us all human, mixed in with a little surrealism, this collection is for you. Ann Cummins is a masterful writer--no wonder she gets the great quote from Dave Eggers!--and I will look forward to her future work. Each one of these stories packs a very powerful punch and will leave you emotionally affected, no matter how tough you think you are. :)
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