Born on a Train
Thirteen Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two years ago--at twenty-two--John McManus captivated writers and critics with his first story collection and became the youngest recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. Now McManus returns with a collection of stories equally piercing and visionary: stories about the young and old, compromised by circumstance and curiosity, and undergoing startling transformations. In "Eastbound," a car driven by two elderly sisters breaks down on an elevated highway: Beneath them lies the lost country of the South, overrun with concrete and shopping centers but still possessing the spectres and secrets of the past. In "Brood," a plucky young heroine moves with her mother into the home of the mother's online boyfriend: She will use the Audubon Guide to Birds, and her own wits to survive the advances of the boyfriend's teenaged son. In "Cowry," two backpackers in New Zealand race to witness the first sunrise of the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The remains of the Old South slouch miserably toward the New South in this forceful but uneven second collection of stories by McManus (Stop Breakin Down). The cast of characters includes Knoxville, Tenn., junkies and an aging belle erotically fixated on her callow grandnephew, but McManus's focus is the redneck culture of the state, where guns, beer and pickups confront air-conditioned malls, minivans and female empowerment. Most of his central figures are doomed masculine exotics a good ol' boy on a crime spree, a trailer-park patriarch obsessed with his aristocratic bloodline, a hillbilly whose land is seized for a national park who hold dead-end service-sector jobs (if any), drink, and express their thwarted Confederate machismo in cruelty to animals. They are objects of fascination for young, sensitive, often gay point-of-view characters who convey the author's lyrical romance with this squalid milieu. McManus's sensibility is that of a Tennessee Williams writing about impoverished hillbillies instead of fading Southern gentlefolk. He has an ear for punchy, pungent dialect ("he stops and spits a wad of juice down on the wood, it smacked down on the boards just smack") which contrasts starkly with the lush imagery of his authorial voice. Unfortunately, his characters are sometimes white trash caricatures, his images are more intense than evocative ("affection... oozed from his fingertips like tobacco spit") and the narrative tends to sag under the weight of hallucinatory prose poems. McManus's vigorous handling of dialogue and setting do not always add up to compelling insights.
