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Duma Key by Stephen King

(Scribner, Export Ed., Hardcover, 592 pp., $28.00)

Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons


           When Stephen King takes on Florida, beachgoers have to worry about a lot more than sharks, sting-rays and man o’ war lurking under the lovely blue-green waters.  In his latest book, Duma Key, King unleashes the supernatural on a small, isolated island on the southwest coast of Florida.

            Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy, middle-aged Minnesota businessman, loses his arm in a construction accident.  Brain damage from the accident makes his memory a bit unreliable.  “Bring over the chum and sick down,” he says, but he means, “Bring over the chair.”  Freemantle isn’t taking life without his arm well, and directs his fury at his wife, Pam.  His therapist gives him Reba, an anger management doll with “a fluff of orange lifeless hair” and “glassy blue eyes,” so he’ll have someone else to yell at.  It doesn’t help.  Tired of the abuse from her frustrated husband, Pam leaves him.  “Quitting birch,” he says.  “Bitch, Edgar,” she corrects him, “The word is bitch.”  Once a happy man, he sinks into despair and contemplates suicide.  Edgar’s psychiatrist intervenes and suggests a geographical change.  So off to Duma Key Edgar Freemantle goes, in search of a new start.

            When he arrives at Big Pink, the two story rental house set on stilts on the shore of Duma Key, he finds he is one of only three residents of the island.  He doesn’t care to meet the others until he can walk the distance between their two houses, so they exchange friendly waves and shouted greetings on the beach each morning as Edgar pushes himself to recover from his accident.  Elizabeth Eastlake, a wheelchair-bound elderly woman, stares out to sea.  On her lucid days she discusses art; on her bad days she smashes tiny porcelain doll figurines on the floor.  The other inhabitant is Elizabeth’s friendly caretaker, Wireman, who refers to himself in third person and sips green tea on a beach chair.  Edgar has occasional visits from Jack, a friendly young local man who lives on the mainland, who was hired to help Edgar with errands.  Edgar’s only other companion is Reba, the sullen anger management doll.  He imagines her saying “Ooouu, you nasty man,” whenever he approaches, yet sets her on the pillow next to him in bed each night.

            In his isolation and effort to heal, Edgar turns to painting, a long-lost hobby, and finds he has more talent than he thought.  In fact, it’s almost as if a divine power takes over as he paints.  His mood improves, he grows stronger and finally makes it to the other end of the key where he befriends Elizabeth and Wireman.  Edgar wonders why Duma Key has escaped the over-development on the rest of Florida’s coastline, and bit by bit he pieces together the dark, horrible past of the island, centered around Elizabeth’s family.  When odd things begin to happen at Big Pink, like the appearance of three pairs of wet footstep prints on the carpet, and Edgar’s hand taking on a life of its own when painting, neither Elizabeth nor Wireman is surprised.  The strangeness escalates and the past crawls out of the sea to terrorize Edgar.  The battle becomes personal, and soon Edgar realizes he is the only one who has a chance of fighting the evil forces.

While the creepy spirits of the past are intriguing, it’s the characters in the present who make Duma Key a rich book.  It’s hard not to love Edgar Freemantle as he honestly faces the brutal kick to the groin life has given him.  You want to pull a seat up to Elizabeth Eastlake’s wheelchair and listen to her stories.  You want to give Wireman a hug when you learn of his tragic past, but you’re also amused by his witty banter. Describing the handful of tourists who come to Duma Key for a short time every winter, Wireman says:

…Wireman is just explaining February on Duma Key, muchacho. I’m going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten boys gets stung by a jelly-fish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they’ll probably stash in the back bedroom again for a week or so.  You think Miss Eastlake’s getting on?  I’ve seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Grandma Mean Dog.  She’s got two basic lines of conversation.  There’s the inquisitive line—‘Did you bring me a cookie?’—and the declarative—‘Get me a towel, Rita, I think that last fart had a lump in it.’

Other fun characters are the happy-go-lucky Jack who tunes into the Bone, the local rock station, Edgar’s college-age daughter, Ilse, who learns about love the hard way, and a local art patron, Mary Ire, who gets sloppy drunk with envy over Edgar’s painting ability.

Duma Key is definitely a book to tuck into your beach bag this summer.  It’s an exploration of human nature and resilience as much as a supernatural tale by a master of horror.  But keep a careful eye on the shore lest a cold wet hand grabs your ankle and drags you out to sea.


Susan Jo Parsons is Publisher of
The Florida Book Review.


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From May to December, by Patricia MacEnulty
(Serpent’s Tail, Paperback, 312 pp., $14.95) 
Reviewed by Stephanie Woolley-Larrea

           “I don’t like being in prison, but I sometimes think we’re always in prison.  We just don’t always know it,” says Alice, one of Pat MacEnulty’s characters in From May to December.  Alice is an inmate at North Florida Correctional Institution.  She, major characters Nicole and Sonya, and  nine other women, are given an opportunity to create and heal through a writing program taught by Lolly and Jennifer Johanssen, sisters more different than alike, living in Tallahassee, Florida.  The lives of the women intersect in this well-plotted novel about the many forms redemption can take.

The prison scenes are a little less than half of the novel.  By sitting in on Lolly and Jennifer’s writing sessions, the reader learns that the female inmates are guilty of violent crimes, thieving scams, bad circumstances, or some combination of the three.  As they work together to write a play, each woman demonstrates a desire to improve her situation.  However, MacEnulty is very pragmatic in her portrayal of life in a women’s prison and in describing the circumstances which can make such self-improvement difficult to impossible.

Meanwhile, Lolly and Jennifer each have a journey to take; Lolly’s is physical while Jennifer’s is emotional, but both have to learn to make peace with their history in order to move forward.  As they travel together to the prison or spend time in and around Tallahassee, the reader learns to like each of them as they learn to like each other.

Whether or not you have spent time in the Panhandle, you will note the detail with which MacEnulty has enriched her setting, from the canopied roads to the local businesses to the drives along the Gulf Coast.  Through character detail and the use of voice, MacEnulty accomplishes the difficult task of keeping the characters differentiated from each other.  Although the audience may wish for different results, MacEnulty is realistic without being melodramatic or overly sentimental.  The past is important, the novel tells us, but ultimately it’s your present behavior which determines the future.

Stephanie Woolley-Larrea is a mother, writer and teacher living in Miami, Florida.  She went to college in Tallahassee and ate at every restaurant mentioned in MacEnulty’s book.  See her writing blog at www.the-green-shirt.blogspot.com.

  



Matucumbe by James A. Michener
(University of Florida Press, Paperback, 165 pp., $21.00)
Reviewed by Mary Jane Ryals


            Oh, those damn rich, successful writers. They have all the luck.

            They send to lit. magazines, and get in because of their names. They can get their grocery lists published, while many writers are scratching to buy groceries.

            But even Pulitzer winners and best selling authors have their failed books.

            Take James A. Michener, who tried to get a short novel, Matecumbe, published without success in the 1980s.  According to one of Michener’s ghostwriters, Joe Avenick, this novel was soundly rejected in Michener’s lifetime.  Michener’s Random House editor, Albert Erskine, said this romance novel sounded too much like Michener’s 1954 novel Sayonara.

            Perhaps Erskine lied.  “More likely, it was rejected because it’s not very good,” said one recent major review.

            The story takes two romances and parallels them.  Mary Ann Mays, an abandoned mom of four in Pennsylvania, finds the wallet of Paul Reynolds, an available investment banker.  He falls in love with her immediately, marries her, moves the family into a nice house, and provides security and love.

            The parallel story involves Melissa Tomlinson, a Philadelphia librarian who travels to the Keys and meets Joe Carlton, a cop.  He falls in love with her, marries her, and provides love and security.

            There’s kindness to the characters, and Michener’s typically sweeping detail describes the Florida Keys geography well.  The description of the Dolphin Harbor Inn shows muscular writing.  Michener says the inn had been “…built like a lean-to, jutting outward from an ancient-looking restored lighthouse that had the distinction of being one of the first structures ever built in Islamorada.  It dated back to 1909, when automobiles were novelties and wagons loaded with the catch of the day rattled along the dirt roads of what was then a sparsely populated fishing village.”  Michener’s taut writing combines history and physical description in two sentences to give readers a whole scene.

            But the book’s two plots never connect, and they have no suspense or conflict or even complication.  I wanted to like this novel.  But the thoughts and dialogue so work against themselves, the novel would be better with most of it cut.  Take Joe’s line of reassurance to Melissa as she’s leaving to return to Philadelphia: “’Someday soon, my lady,’ Joe commiserated, with his arm around her shoulder, “there’ll be another time, another dance.’”

            The women characters are one and two dimensional—thinking a lot about their blonde hair or about shaving their legs—while the unbelievably sensitive men all care deeply about these women.  In one section, Melissa thinks, “As she continued to contemplate her date, Melissa searched her memory but couldn’t recall, even in high school, ever having gone out with a guy who had so many muscles.”

            You get a formula romance without the intrigue or indulgences of the formula’s pleasures.

            The “Afterword,” though, by ghostwriter Joe Avenick, should get Michener’s historians’ and critics’ mouths watering.  Michener (1907-1997) had begun a third marriage in Philadelphia at the time he met Missy DeMaio in the Florida Keys (Avenick introduced them).  They began a torrid love affair.  This novel, apparently, is Michener’s attempt to work out “some issues,” as we now love to call these messy parts of our lives.


Mary Jane Ryals lives in Tallahassee. She’s published a book of short fiction, and has a poetry collection,
The Moving Waters, forthcoming with Kitsune Books.


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Tourist Season by Enid Shomer

(Random House, Paperback, 272 pp., $13.95)
Reviewed by Susan Parsons

          Enid Shomer’s short story collection, Tourist Season, begins with a knock at the door.  Fifty-something year-old Iris Hornstein peers over the aluminum flamingo on her porch screen and sees two Tibetan monks, Lu and Wangrit, standing there.  She quickly tries to get rid of them, “I don’t contribute to charities without reading about them first.”  “We don’t want your money,” they answer.  Instead, Lu and Wangrit have come to inform Iris that she is “the reincarnation of the Great Adept, his holiness, the Saint Amarjampa.”

At first Iris protests--she’s Jewish after all.  But then her husband Aaron comes home, a man who has “a stocky body and curvy legs, like a Matisse, and lack[s] the competitive spirit and ambition that destroyed her first two marriages.”  Aaron insists the reincarnation makes perfect sense since Iris literally glows when she has an orgasm.  As Iris considers the idea, she recalls certain moments of spiritual clarity while working out at her gym. And so Iris and Aaron, accompanied by Lu and Wangrit, leave Florida for Tibet to begin Iris’ training for sainthood.

The stories in this collection introduce women at challenging points in their lives.  In “The Other Mother,” an adoptive mother has to come to terms with a dark secret and “Rapture” gives us a soon-to-be divorcée who reflects on her failed marriage, her career and her certainty that she is going to die. In the title story, “Tourist Season,” a woman copes with having her recently retired husband around the house all the time.  Two female porn writing colleagues reveal their misconceptions about each other in “The Hottest Spot on Earth.”

With a name like Tourist Season it’s not surprising that most of the stories are set in Florida--from Hallandale Beach to Fort Myers to a fictitious North Florida town named Sweetheart.  Sweetheart, in fact, appears in two stories about Garland, a young woman who is struggling to find happiness in all the wrong places. The one disappointment about the book is that the two Garland stories are kind of a tease.  You grow attached to the character and the town of Sweetheart and want more.

Tourist Season is filled with quirky characters in surprising situations, but the most engaging aspect of the book is Shomer’s witty description.  In “Laws of Nature” for example, Shomer writes, “Several years before, when Helen turned sixty, she had become, for all intents and purposes, invisible, except for isolated body parts at doctors’ and dentists’ offices…Socially speaking, she no longer counted, like being naked in front of the dog.”

Shomer, an award-winning poet, is a resident of Tampa.  She has said she plans to follow up this collection with a novel.  I hope it’s about Garland.


Susan Parsons is the Publisher of
The Florida Book Review.


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St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Stories by Karen Russell

(Knopf, Hardcover, 256 pp. $22.00)

Reviewed by P. Scott Cunningham


           
Coral Gables High graduate Karen Russell’s debut short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves has no shortage of home-grown imagination. Fairy tales and children’s stories of all stripes combine with Floridian brushstrokes to form her adolescent stories of sleepaway camps for insomniacs, haunted underwater caves, and forbidden ice palaces. One (“from Children’s Reminisces of the Western Migration”) even reads eerily like a riff on the old computer game “Oregon Trail,” and only a native Floridian could describe hanging rain drops as “the icicles of the tropics.”

Most of the stories are narrated in first-person by some middle child trying desperately to fit in, free at last to use the vocabulary he has acquired by spending too much time beneath the lamp light. Made-up words like “flamingular” mark these narrators not only as Floridian but also as icons of that age when we’re just beginning to feel the power of our own intellect. When the voice occasionally breaks down, it’s because the language has left the character to pack in as many multisyllabic words as possible—a common problem for first-time authors.

More often though Russell’s voice feels magical and age-specific. In “City of Shells,” when the narrator corrects an assessment of her friend Laramie as “sophisticated,” she sums up every girl I was in love with in middle school: “What the teachers actually mean is that Laramie has huge boobs; that she smells like coconut oil and unfiltered Camels; and that she gives it up to high school boys named Federico.”

Many of her sentences are poetic: “I wish someone would murder a sheep every night of my life,” while others are refreshingly hilarious, such as this one, used when describing a woman who, as part of her job as Zamboni driver and disc jockey for an adult ice rink, wears a yeti suit: “She was abominable in the best way.”

What sometimes eludes Russell, or perhaps falls victim to her lyricism, is endings. Most of the stories feel as though they should end on an ellipsis. “Haunting Olivia” for instance, the New Yorker story that launched Russell’s career, has a sound premise—two boys in search of their drowned sister—but ends on the exact same note of regret it began on, with the two boys no closer to any form of conclusion, real or imagined.

The title story has no such shortcoming. “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” is about—in a delightful instance of truth in advertising—a pack of fifteen werewolf children sent to a Catholic finishing school to learn to behave like young ladies. Besides being the perfect metaphor for adolescence, the werewolf conceit allows Russell to reduce her characters to the raw emotional responses that drive all good fiction. In the course of literalizing all sorts of clichéd animal metaphors for human behavior—“We would snarl at each other for no reason;” “Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us”—Russell taps into something ancient: beneath all of our golfing and table-manners lies something untrainable, dangerous, and beautiful. This to me is the task of fiction—stripping away the details that conceal, like a skin, the archetypal human animal, and Russell accomplishes it in a way that feels fresh and true.


P. Scott Cunningham is a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor and a regular contributor to the New Times. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pool, Court Green, Cider Press Review and Mc Sweeney’s Internet Tendencies.


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The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa by Gonzalo Barr

(Mariner Books, Paperback, 208 pp., $12.00)

Reviewed by Louis K. Lowy


           Miami is kinetic, lazy, dangerous, ridiculous, old-fashioned, trend setting, bigoted, welcoming, and one of the most exciting cities in the country and arguably the world. Gonzalo Barr, in his premiere collection of nine short stories The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa, winner of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize, has seized the heart of this sub-tropical metropolis and exposed its arteries to the reader. He conjures up a cast of characters that could only come from the steamy over-crowded expressways, brightly painted high rises, creamy shores and beached Cuban exile rafts that are Miami.

          Braulio, the title character in the hilarious “Braulio Wants His Car Back,” tries desperately to get his shyster friend, Pepe Luis, to return his vehicle. The story, like a downhill snowball gaining girth and momentum, is reminiscent of a Buster Keaton comedy. It ends, as all great Keaton shorts do, with a climax that brings not only laughter but also a touch of pathos.

           Barr explores Miami’s dark side just as brilliantly in the title story “The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa.” What starts as a fantasy on the beach for out-of-towner Pete Burger becomes a nightmare of reality.

          The author takes us behind the curtain of the magic city in “Faith” and reveals its illusion in the guise of Trip Perez, the shock-and-awe news anchor who confronts everyone but himself.

          Most impressively, Barr has the ability to illustrate the hopes and dreams of Miami. In the touching “A Natural History Of Love” sixteen-year-old Silvia, the daughter of upper-middle class second-generation Cubans, deals with being dumped by Rolly for refusing to go all the way. In the process, the reader not only experiences the awkward not-quite-a-child but not-quite-an adult years, but also the angst of balancing the world of the older Cuban exiles and the modern Cuban-Yuppies. From the chapter ‘The War Of My Grandmother’s Black Beans’ - Silvia explains:

If I don’t exhaust every hyperbole to describe her black beans . . . my grandmother will say, “Ay, Silvita doesn’t like the food.” There’s no turning back. It’s the first volley in the war, a battle cry to my grandfather, who then pipes up about the loss of Cuban values among the Youth of Today. From the specific – you don’t like my black beans – my grandparents extract the general – you reject your Cuban roots. From the individual – you look down on the Cuban – they get the universal – your entire generation despises everything Cuban, thus assuring the Imminent Demise of Civilization as we Know It.

           Barr’s use of description and minutia had me nodding my head in sympathy and rooting for his heroine as he skillfully brought resolution to this coming-of-age tale.

Recently, I sat on my front porch, beneath the pearly quarter moon, and thought of Gonzalo Barr’s short stories as I soaked in the sounds of south Florida - the steady distant traffic, the wind gusts, the rustling hibiscus and the booming salsa.  It came to me that Barr’s collection can best be summed up by his character Trip Perez, the newscaster in the aforementioned “Faith,” as he tells his attorney that he is purchasing a sculpture:

“I’m going to take it.”

“Does this thing have a name or don’t they do that anymore?”

“It’s called Ecce Homo, which means, my dear counselor, ‘Behold, man!’”

To read The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa is to behold not only man and woman but also the shimmer and dissonance that is Miami.


Louis K. Lowy, a retired firefighter who lives in Miami Lakes, FL, is a struggling husband and father, struggling writer, struggling musician, struggling filmmaker, struggling student, and an accomplished struggler.


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All or Nothing by Preston L. Allen

(Akashic Books, Paperback, 252 pp., $14.95)

Reviewed by John Rodonis


All or Nothing
Carries an Ace in the Hole


            You call your job and whisper, I don’t feel good. I can’t come in.

            Then you shower, put on your uniform, and tell your wife, Well, goodbye, hon, I’m off to work.

            Then you go gamble.

...and so begins, All or Nothing, a fast-read fiction by Preston L. Allen that begs, borrows, sweats, steals, spins, shoots and shuffles its way from the Indian casino slots of Miami to the high-stake poker tables of Vegas—and back.  In the process, Allen deals out a plot and flip-flop of character perhaps a bit too serendipitous, while, to his credit, realistically portraying the desperate, manic and nerve-wracking world of the compulsive gambler.

Allen certainly seems well-researched, even well-versed, as he both subtly and grossly captures the insidious nature of compulsive gambling.  An eccentric character named Professor, presenting a theory on the essence of sexual desire, likens the casino to the alluring “roundness” of a seductress, one who uses men and women alike for her own hedonistic desires, then discards them, temporarily relieved of their “discomfort” and spent till next time.

Through the protagonist P’s first person narrative, Allen examines the flaming abyss compulsive gambling burns in its victims’ guts, self-esteem and bank accounts, the desperate, myopic immediacy it incites, the self-destructive need it feeds on, the families and relationships it destroys. For with gamblers, it really is all or nothing. Usually nothing. Take it from a reviewer who’s been there. Allen is right on the money here.

If someone says, Buy some medicine for me with this $20, my life depends on it, and you go to the casino, you will blow all of your money, all of the money in your ATM up to the daily maximum, then dig around in your pockets for whatever spare change you have remaining, and blow the $20 your friend gave you, whether his life depends on it or not. You will leave with nothing. Every penny you have goes into the machines because you never know when lady luck is going to dance with you. Tonight, I blew all of my loose cash, blew my daily max on the ATM, then went out to the car and found three quarters and 26 pennies in the toll tray. That made a dollar. That was all I needed.

The doomed P. is a “comfortably married” man who works a second night job to support his habit first, then his family. He’s a number pattern-analyzing, ATM keypad-pounding, dig-in-the-seats-for-lost-lunch-money school bus driver slot addict who manages to convince his wife (who has an eye for antiques, but seems blind to reality) they’re rolling in dough.

Along the way, P. accumulates three lawn bags full of ATM receipts he keeps in the garage to offset taxes should he score big.  The $100,000 he’d won (and slots ate) wasn’t big enough. It never is.

Allen constructs his plot around wild, sometimes convenient, swings of fortune.  P. befriends “C.L.,” a slot-crazed woman he employs to curb his own compulsivity.  Soon after, just as casino security closes in on a disguised P who has been barred due to never elaborated on IRS problems, P makes one final desperation slot play and wins $160,000.  When he brings his winnings home, his wife, sick of it all, dumps him, refusing the money.  P and C.L. move on to Las Vegas where P. discovers—at least for a time—a heretofore unknown discipline and success.

After P. strikes it rich, women are more than willing to “barter” with him in his suite for money to scratch that indelible itch. “C.L.,” “E.V.,” “S.” and “Missy” (the “twelve-step” initialization of names reminds us that these people are addicts), are female characters so degenerately entrenched in “the game” they’ll do anything for another chance to “hit it hard” at the one-arm-bandits, chasing the “ping ping” payoff of hitting “the big one.” P.’s willingness to fund their addiction is their “luck.”  As for what happens to his, you’ll have to read the book.

All or Nothing is a recommended read, one that weaves a world where people live and die waiting for “their numbers” to appear in ordered redemption. And if this place proves unrecognizable, then the reader has certainly had little experience gambling.

And my most earnest advice would be to keep it that way.


John Rodonis is an organ transplant recipient majoring in living to its fullest a second chance at life, while studying English Lit. at FIU.


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You Can’t Get There From Here and Other Stories by Leonard Nash

(Kitsune Books, Paperback 180 pp., $15.00)

Reviewed by Michael Trammell


           Having grown up in south Florida in the 70s and 80s, I know well the world Leonard Nash captures in his debut short story collection You Can't Get There from Here and Other Stories.  Nash nails the sense of place here, from the street names to the landscape's flora, from the withering humidity to the anemic listlessness of spirit that haunted, and in some cases still haunts, neighborhoods in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties.  These stories also work well to show the change that occurred as the area boomed in the 80s and 90s.  Young professionals from the new guard clash with rugged long-time residents, some of whom barely have enough cash for the week's groceries.

            The opening story "Sharks" captures this clash especially well.  The piece's narrator, Mitchell T. Garvey, has worked with cars for decades.  Sonny Peterson, the dealership's new sales manager, sees Garvey as a dinosaur, a goof-ball who cares too much about the customers and walks to work instead of drives. Garvey longs for the times when relationships mattered, before the bottom line became the overriding principle.  He remembers how his father's "fleet customers sent him Christmas cards and tickets to Dolphins games" and how the former owner "would put on one of his plaid sports jackets and shoot another loud commercial for them to run during the late movie on the UHF stations."  But Peterson bluntly explains the new reality: "If the good lord Jesus Christ waltzes into this place, you have to be ready to sell him an Edsel with bald tires and a blown head gasket."

            Not recognizing the importance of relationships also haunts "What More Do You Want?" which is one of the more poignant stories in the book.  Oscar Pierce, the piece's protagonist, seems to have only a dim notion of what his wife, now dying of cancer in the hospital, once meant to him, and what a new acquaintance, Abraham Johnson, can truly offer.  Pierce views his wife's possessions as garage sale items he can sell for cash to play at Gulfstream horse track. J ohnson, though big-heartedly trying to give Pierce a job, only seems useful to the protagonist as a tipster on the ponies.  Not until Pierce, desperate, tries to pawn the kitchen's huge refrigerator does he start to understand how much his heart has dried up.

            The characters' desperation, the blue collar and unglamorous settings, and the sparse prose in Nash's collection will remind readers of Raymond Carver's minimalist stories.  Like Carver, Nash too likes to experiment with pieces that are short and scaled down to the bare minimum of words.  This book's very short pieces at times resemble the taut miniatures of Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.  Some critics have argued that these works don't pack the power of Carver's more fully fleshed-out stories, and the same might be said of Nash's narratives.  The stories in You Can't Get There from Here that open up and truly give the story time to soar are arguably the ones that transport readers the greatest distances.


Michael Trammell is the editor-in-chief of the
Apalachee Review. His work has appeared in New Letters, Pleiades, G.W. Review, and other journals. He's a Research Associate in Business Communication at Florida State University, where he teaches professional writing and presentation skills.


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An American Family: The Baby With The Strange Markings by Harry Crews
(Graham Press, Hardcover, 115 pp., $20.00)
Reviewed by David Ash


In A Pig's Eye

         The Old South will never rise again.
          Not in Florida.
          Not anywhere.
          It is fading quickly into the long shadows of cypress bayous, moldering swamps and the gray hollows of Appalachia. Replaced by Super Walmart, American Idol, NASCAR, meth-amphetamine and the Cracker Barrel.
         Some say good riddance to seedy juke joints, cut and shoot bars, break-your-back dirt farms and dark history of slavery and racial intolerance. But there is a danger the baby will be hosed out with the bath water. A handful of musicians and writers cling to what Flannery O'Conner called the "wise blood."
        In the darkly beautiful BBC documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which pursues the soul of the poor white South through the eyes of blues singer Jim White, retired professor and writer Harry Crews stands at the center of a dirt road and tells us:
        "Truth of the matter was, stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of seeing who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked. The right way and the way that was not so right."
         Like most Florida writers, Crews is not even from here. His 1978 nonfiction work A Childhood: The Biography of a Place chronicles a tenant farm family's journey south from Georgia. It remains the hard scrabble classic of Florida literature.
         In his recent novel, the grimly unbeautiful An American Family, many wrongs somehow lead to a right. The protagonist, Major Melton (major meltdown), a junior college professor, is cuckolded by his best friend and sexually humiliated by his wife. Friends and family prick and torment him, salt his open wounds. A demented pit bull howls from a too-short leash tied to the last remaining tree in his planned community, Crippled Horse Acres. Madness prevails.
        This is not a tale for the prude or faint of spleen. Crews' secondary characters are unrepentant, unsympathetic, guiltless white trash. You will not take them home to meet your mother. The writing is untaut, broad stroke, grapeshot hurled from a cannon maw. Yet there is authority to the voice and self-mockery.
        There is a child at stake. The infant has a strange birth mark on his penis. Major doesn't know if the baby is his or not. He may be driven from his own home. "Major felt as if nails of ice had been driven into his spine." Much is at stake in this hallucinatory nightmare, and, somehow, Major remains intact through it all.
          Crews' characters have often journeyed to the periphery of normal and flung themselves into the lake of fire. His raw metaphors and surreal humor wage war against the forces of mediocrity and commodification.
          If Kierkegaard believed life could only be understood backwards, Crews believes it can only be known turned upside-down and shaken.
          Count the Old South down and out? In a pig's eye.

David Ash is a veteran, ex-cop, writer and bibliophile living in Longwood, Florida.



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Love and Ghost Letters by Chantel Acevedo
(St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, 320pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Yaddyra Peralta

          In Love and Ghost Letters, seventeen-year-old Josefina Navarro falls in love with Lorenzo Concepcion, a charming loafer in 1930s Havana, despite his warning: "I have no money, and I drink rum and whiskey." Her father Antonio, a high-ranking police sergeant, cautions her that Lorenzo will lead her down a path to penury and hardship, but, entranced by Lorenzo's forthrightness and unbridled sexuality, she doesn't listen.
          Immediately after the wedding, Josefina's new husband drags her off to El Cotorro, a dust-covered town so destitute that when a baker's cart overturns young and old alike mob him. Despite this harsh introduction to a life of poverty, and her husband's constant infidelity, pride keeps the new bride and her father apart. After he is presumed dead in a student-led riot, she begins to receive ghostly letters signed "Tu Papa"-Your Father. But lest you think the novel is taking a turn for the magical realist, the letters are actually addressed from a live Antonio who emigrated to the U.S.
           Chantel Acevedo's debut novel re-imagines the lost world of pre-Castro Cuba, a time when the island was just a short ferry ride away from Key West. Spanning close to fifty years, the narrative lovingly takes its time at each stop, whether it be Josefina's European-style Havana bedroom complete with its own pianoforte or her new home in El Cotorro, its resident orisha (Santeria god) crawling with cockroaches.
           There are a few surprises along the way, like when Antonio Navarro decides to let Cuba think he is dead. Without papers, he scams his way onto a ferry to Florida where a customs agent, Mona Linde (lovely monkey in Spanish) takes a shine to him and takes him home to Miami Springs, in return for some lovin', of course.
           Unfortunately, there are not enough surprises and too many false starts. Characters like Lorenzo, and, later, his grown children, take risks and run away several times to Havana and for a few brief pages attempt new lovers, new enterprises-sometimes illegal ones-only to give up and return home dejected. Antonio himself, for no reason other than homesickness, decides to return to the island after Mona Linde's death. Josefina's reaction to this reunion is one of disappointment, and I sure know how she feels.
           In the last third of the book, as the timeline veers closer to the Cuban Revolution, the characters left on the island begin to shrink like dying flowers. And though this may be a statement about the effect of historical developments, this reader would have preferred active characters not overwhelmed by outside events.

Yaddyra Peralta is a second-year student in the M.F.A program at Florida International University. She is also the current art editor for Gulf Stream Magazine.


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