The Way People Run: Stories [Hardcover]

Christopher Tilghman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1999

In The Way People Run, one of America's finest writers, the author of Mason's Retreat ("magnificent"--Publishers Weekly) and In a Father's Place ("radiant"--The New York Times), gives us a new collection of stunning short stories, brilliant fiction about the deep emotional connections, and disconnections, between people and within people's inner lives. Against the backdrop of vivid settings, especially the Chesapeake Bay region and the American West, Tilghman writes with passion, generosity, and grace about the ways people con-front themselves and the lives they've created. In The Way People Run, chosen by Robert Stone for the 1992 Best American Short Stories volume, a man goes west to find a new job and, out of the framework of the familiar, loses his hold on his family and his old life. In Something Important, Peter Ramsey undertakes a reunion with his long-lost brother, and discovers that his wife is in love with someone else. In Things Left Undone, chosen by Tobias Wolff to appear in the 1994 Best American Short Stories, a young couple tries to survive a tragedy. As Andre Dubus said about In a Father's Place, Christopher Tilghman "is a spiritual writer who often looks at things the rest of us cannot see." Life's truths are at the heart of these magnificent stories by a modern American master.

Praise for Mason's Retreat

Magnificent...Tilghman's first novel places him securely in the ranks of our most accomplished writers."                          
--Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written...fully imagined...Few first novels are narrated with the clarity, economy, and masterful assurance Tilghman brings to this re-markably moving and persuasive tale."                    
--Entertainment Weekly

Rich with character and sweet with the scent of a Maryland farm in America's mid-century summer...The moral center of this novel is larger than all its sorrows, which have about them the inevitable arc of a star falling from a darkening sky."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for In a Father's Place
A collection that signals the appearance of a gifted new writer."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A simple, classic feel, as if written from deep in the American grain...It is a magnificent portrait."
--Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

About Mason's Retreat

Echoes of The Great Gatsby, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, O'Neill, and Faulkner...a stunning individual achievement."                                
--Kirkus Reviews

Mason's Retreat is a brilliant book--full of wisdom and insight into the workings of the soul. The language is perfect. Every paragraph holds a treasure. This is one of the most thoroughly satisfying novels you will ever read."    --Kaye Gibbons

Powerful...a work of surpassing thematic seriousness and fictive artistry. In all respects, Mason's Retreat is exemplary."
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Christopher Tilghman is often mentioned in the same breath as John Cheever or William Maxwell--American masters who have mapped the difficult terrain of domestic life. Pretty exalted company, but Tilghman more than holds his own in the novel Mason's Retreat and the short-story collection In a Father's Place. The Way People Run is yet another example of both his skill as a stylist and his insight into the workings of everyday life. In "Something Important" Peter Randall is lured by his older brother Mitch to a family cottage in the Chesapeake country. The two men haven't seen each other in several years and their relationship has never been close. Yet when, in the course of the two days they spend together, Peter discovers that his brother knows something that he doesn't about his own marriage, it is Mitch who offers comfort:

Peter felt that hand and heard these words, and both of them helped. This boat he sat on, it was Mitch's idea of a gift, not coming empty-handed to the hospital room, no need to sit around getting maudlin for Christ's sake. Peter thumped on the desk and looked up at Mitch. "Thanks for this," he said.

"Room for Mistakes" follows Hal from his failing bank job in Boston back to the family ranch in Montana after the death of his mother whom he had loved "as his mother had loved him, from a distance." What starts out as a temporary pilgrimage home soon becomes a tangle of emotions and ghosts as Hal must confront his feelings about the ranch, his long-dead father, and the surprising revelations of his mother's will. Tilghman reveals a complicated subtext of jealousy, love, resentment, and hope through the mix of characters he introduces: Hal and his city-wife, Marcie; his step-father, Roy, who was once his mother's ranch hand; and Shannon, the housekeeper.

Tilghman has a knack for writing articulately about inarticulate people. In every story, actions speak louder than words, and though there's plenty of dialogue, most of Tilghman's meaning can be found in the accretion of telling details and in the behavior of his characters toward each other. These are the best kind of short stories--the ones you can read more than once and still find something new every time. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

The six rich and complex stories here will add to the reputation Tilghman established in In a Father's Place and the novel Mason's Retreat. As in much of his earlier work, family homes, and journeys to them, play a central role, from a modest "old family cottage on the Rappahannock" to a once grand Hattiesburg home now become a funeral parlor. Redolent with family history, these properties quickly remind the characters they have not lived up to standards set for them. In "Room for Mistakes," Hal, a Boston banker who appeared in a story in Tilghman's first collection, returns, when his mother dies, to the Montana cattle ranch where he grew up, ostensibly to settle the estate but in fact to make peace with the mother he could not satisfy and with the profession that now bores him to death. Gradually, Hal comes to see managing the ranch as his opportunity to salve both wounds, finding the mercies of "a place to come home to." As the book's title suggests, Tilghman's characters are in flight, often to the family property, seeking an answer in their heritage. In the title narrative, Barry, an unemployed fund manager on a fruitless job search in the West, takes a side trip on his way to his wife and children in New York. He visits the dying prairie town where his maternal grandfather retreated after he abandoned his proper Hartford family. What is clear as Barry leaves this barren community, deciding to turn west and away from his own family, is that he has found some of his grandfather in himself. Tilghman grants all his characters dignity, even those who appear to fail, and takes care to make the reader feel the full weight of their lives, skillfully filling in years of history in a few deft sentences. Indeed, the closing story, "Things Left Undone," covers as much terrainAa marriage, a child's birth, that child's death, the breaking and the mending of the marriageAas many far less moving novels. In this short narrative, as in all the others, Tilghman takes his characters through their darkest hours and into the light again, a journey he makes the reader grateful to feel to the bone. Author tour. (May) FYI: The title story appears in The Best American Short Stories 1992; another story will appear in this year's volume.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 209 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067944971X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679449713
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,751,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enthusiastic recommendation, August 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Way People Run: Stories (Hardcover)

Tilghman's IN A FATHER'S PLACE is one of my favorite story collections, and I found MASON'S RETREAT to be a truly magnificent novel. THE WAY PEOPLE RUN is a more than worthy addition to Tilghman's body of work and my bookshelf. Tilghman knows how to develop characters with depth and grace. While I found all of the stories engrossing, the final two pieces are masterpieces, fresh and strange and humane by turns. A high recommendation.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as In A Father's Place!, April 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Way People Run: Stories (Hardcover)

Tilghman's first book, In A Father's Place, was on of the best short story collections I had ever read. His second collection, The Way People Run, is just as powerful. Poignant and haunting, these five stories stick you. My favorite was the title story about an unemployed investment banker on the run across the badlands. In every story, Tilghman's language is poetic, spare, memorable. Tilghman is truly one of America's finest short story writers.

4.0 out of 5 stars Compassionate, unflinching studies of family and identity, July 10, 2001

By 

C. Wierzbicki (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Way People Run: Stories (Hardcover)

There are two movies I've seen that call to mind what Tilghman does so aptly: "Nobody's Fool" (in which Paul Newman plays a somewhat childish man who has no clue about how to age gracefully) and "Affliction" (in which Nick Nolte and James Coburn are locked in corrosive father-son dysfunctionality). The stories in this collection unflinchingly document the breakdowns in communication that occur between "loved ones" who find it difficult to love each other. The often bristling exchanges between two brothers in "Something Important" are but one example. Though the stories here a bit more ruminative and not as tightly written as the ones in "In a Father's Place," they still leave an enduring impression.