Customer Reviews

Refresh, Refresh: Stories

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Benjamin Percy possesses a narrative voice that can only be described as hard, imaginative and haunting. At least two of the stories in this collection are good enough to be among the greatest short stories I've ever read. I highly recommend this book, especially for those who enjoy a very masculine voice that relies heavily on imagery and metaphor and for those who enjoy authors like Cormac McCarthy and Phil LaMarche, who have similar styles.

"Refresh, Refresh" is rock'n'roll in form of short stories. It is an instant page-turner and you will be re-reading the stories more than once. The only other authors which gave me the same buzz were Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Raymond Chandler. Percy's language is brutally honest and polished, two qualities that are hard to come by in the space needed to deliver a short story. Don't forget to get "Language of Elk" along with "Refresh, Refresh."

Tumalo, Oregon is the American frontier of today- far different than the John Wayne, plus sized machismo, and tobacco-spitting Wild West of black and white cowboy movies.

Tumalo has many textures. Good and evil don't fight each other in horseback showdowns; they are confusedly linked like a jelly fish's tentacles. Pain and loss live on the surface of daily life.

Percy's Tumalo is firstly a masculine world. A world of omnipresent blood, of knuckle-tearing and sledgehammer-swinging factory work, snot and dirt-filled backyard brawls, Budweiser's consumed in front of nightly Wheel of Fortune episodes, and piles of animal bones.

This western and resourceful frontier brawniness, in all its masculinity, however, never ceases being real.

The turbocharged, big chested, Papa Hemingway manliness serves to merely color the inescapable pains and joy's of everyday life: a father at war, a wife's miscarriage, a father tormented with watching his daughter suffer through a destructive relationship.

The brawny, unshaven gruff, the stand-up freezers of hanging deer carcasses, the vultures, hunting dogs, and pools of deep red blood wouldn't work, just wouldn't work without the counterposed textures of human vulnerability and tenderness: the struggling marriage, an aging man feeling his mortality, a tyrannical and abusive husband, and father and son whom cannot find the words to pierce the silence of a car ride down a quiet country road.

The vulnerability and masculinity in "Refresh, Refresh" interplay in a polyphonic, brilliant way that is above all- authentic. These stories from Benjamin Percy represent life lived honestly, if not perfectly, and in unwavering recognition of the human struggles that befall, in some form, us all.

Take the interior, emotional world of the protagonist in "The Meltdown". It is a sculpture in high relief, set against the backdrop of a nuclear and Chernobyl-like exterior landscape.

This grim setting along with the "numbness" of the Iraqi war veteran protagonist play off each other in a powerful way. The pure desolation of the radiation-filled landscape only draws the reader further and more immediately into the interior world of the story's main character.

Percy, with prose that is as modern and authentically American as the new frontier world he evokes, as hardscrabble and raw as the landscape of Tumalo, and as resourceful and optimistic as the town's most praiseworthy inhabitants, has created a collection of stories not to be overlooked.

The characters who populate Benjamin Percy's short stories don't mince words about the quality of their lives. Nor do they pretend to be optimistic when their surroundings essentially depress them or bring them pain. These people, all of whom live in rather desolate circumstances, distance themselves from spouses, family and friends; most struggle to gain some coherent understanding of life, often engaging in violent acts of self-creation. Percy's collection, "Refresh, Refresh," is disturbing, provocative and compelling. At times, readers may literally turn their heads from the detailed wreckage of lives the author details, but there can be no doubt that the Percy is a talented writer. His direct style includes clean, believable dialogue and remarkably beautiful imagery.

The protagonists live in small, east-of-the-Cascades towns in rural Oregon; they wrestle with the consequences of the American involvement in the Iraq war, a cataclysm that shreds the fabric of community life, bequeathing residents with the residue of cynicism and an oppressive sense of hopelessness. The short story from which the book takes its name gives is representative of the themes Percy emphasizes throughout the collection. Two rootless teenagers, both of whose fathers have "vanished" into the maws of the American war machine, find it nearly impossible to express the anger, disappointment and frustrations they experience. Bordering on the fringe of nihilism, they prefer destruction to creation, self-effacement to self-affirmation. Their act of revenge, perfectly realized, elicits disgust, horror and a begrudged admiration.

Percy knows how to balance the disquieting realities and disconcerting personalities. Whether we find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world, where nuclear winter has caused a quarantine of half of the United States, or wandering in the subterranean caves of the Cascade Mountains, Percy navigates the terrain with people who are embittered, enraged and often impotent to effect anything less than violent change. Each of the ten stories in the collection resonates with an honest examination of pain.

"Refresh, Refresh" is not for the squeamish. Violence and despair abound. Its naturalistic approach to human weakness and its absolute commitment to a frightening exploration of people pushed past the edge of socially-acceptable behavior make this collection an important contribution to the study of American life in the twenty-first century. We may not like the images Benjamin Percy presents, but there can be no doubt as to how steadily he holds up the mirror.

Anyone who grumbles that contemporary fiction is in the toilet, that short stories are dead, that the "younger generation" has not produced anything of real literary value, should shut up and read Benjamin Percy.

Great short stories..

Out of the ten stories in the book, five are really, really oustanding!

Refresh, Refresh
The Caves in Oregon
The Woods
Meltdown
When the Bear Came

I randomnly came across this book and took a chance on it, well worth the cover price!

This is Benjamin Percy's 2nd novel of short stories, his 1st book, "The Language of Elk" I have not read, but all the reviews are good!!

I've never read anything with the type of vivid descriptions that Percy uses in his stories.

He is a young, very talented writer who isnt really well known (yet) and I will definitely read his next book....

This review originally appeared on my blog, which can be found on my site at [...].

I guess I'm a little cynical. I lost faith in the short story? Did I? Is that it? When I read, I'm hopeful. And, despite my faithlessness, I am sometimes surprised.

Let's see. I bought their books after reading Richard Russo's "Horseman," Roy Kesey's "Wait," Nathan Englander's "How We Avenged the Blums," and William Gay's, "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?" Lorrie Moore has been pretty influential. Kyle Minor gave me a Flannery O'Connor epiphany with "A Day Meant to Do Less." And I'm still in love with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Sometimes I hold the stories up to my own fierce literary theories about the redemptive end (see my essay on "Lost," which is out there somewhere). Sometimes I read stuff and just forget about it. But sometimes I read something and take notes.

Okay, let's not call me "cynical." Let's use "eclectic" instead.

So I just finished Benjamin Percy's Refresh, Refresh.

This is one of the good ones. I'm not sure it really meets my whole redemptive-end-standards, but these are good stories with meaning and resolution. They're also fairly, hmm, masculine. I can tell a guy wrote them. I hope that's okay to say. I know I don't like when people say that I write for women (I don't!)--but I'm okay if you say I write like a girl. These are stories written by a guy, though they're not enmeshed in that Hemingway macho stuff. There is, however, a fair amount of hunting and fishing.

But, ultimately, they're stories for men and women. Perhaps they deal with a universal concern. They ask, if you will, the secularized version of the question posed by theologian Francis Schaeffer, "How shall we then live?" Soldiers return home from Iraq. How shall we then live? Marriages sour. How shall we then live? A car crash kills. How shall we then live? A father abandons his family. How shall we then live?

I liked most of the stories, but my favorites were "The Caves of Oregon," "Meltdown," and "Crash." "The Caves of Oregon" plays a little, maybe, with Camus' "Allegory of the Cave" (okay, I'm probably making this up)--but I like stories about marriages that contain the sweetness and the pitfalls of commitment. Good marriage stories are kinda rare. "Meltdown" reminded me a little of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and a little of The Road Warrior, the movie (Mel Gibson, circa my late childhood). But there were things in this story that weren't in The Road--and their absence in The Road always bugged me! This story had context! A reason for its apocalyptic reality! The protagonist had a history! That is serious cause for celebration! And then "Crash." (Yeah, I have my own car crash story.) I liked this for a number of reasons. Part of it has to do with marriage again. The protagonist is destroyed over the death of his wife; however, it wasn't a marriage or a life he dreamed about. He married the high school girlfriend because she was pregnant. He didn't go out into the world to study international politics. He didn't live in a big, beautiful house. He lived with his wife and kid in a trailer by his parents' farm, where he worked too. And, yet, this death--the death of his wife--devastates him. She was his wife nonetheless. I also like the way the protagonist talks to his daughter, and the way he has a moment of shame because his groceries do not include soymilk. But, again, a central theme is a line in the story: "Here is my life."

Oh, did I mention these stories mostly take place in Oregon? Which is refreshing, pun slightly intended, because most stories these days seem pretty East Coastish--even my own. Unless we're talking Annie Proulx, but we're not.

I'll read more Benjamin Percy. I think they're making a movie of his novel?

Benjamin Percy is one of my favorite authors writing today. He's able to mix genre fiction with literary fiction to create captivating, eloquent stories. Loved this book. Also, check out The Wilding: A Novel, which was fantastic.

I haven't been so impressed by a newly discovered (by me, that is) writer of short stories since someone handed me a copy of The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in 1984 or so. I'm pleased to discover that this Northwestern Gothic author is alive and well, and I can look forward to more and even better work in the future. As with most collections of short stories it suffers a bit by being read "at a gulp" as I did--then you notice that he's too fond of people having "black bags" under their eyes, but that's a small flaw in an otherwise disturbing yet satisfying group of stories.

I highly recomend this book to anyone. I agree with most of the reviews posted here and would only summarize what I believe are the most remarkable things about the author and the book:
- a particular combination of honest and polished language
- worth the price and TIME (I don't regret buying/reading this book)
- a great voice that contributes to contemporary fiction
- unique and very illustrative metaphors
- NO weak stories (that's a 10 out of 10!!!)
- beautiful imagery

Let your mind fly for a while with Percy's hands on the reins and you won't regret it!