Fight Scenes
-
- $22.99
-
- $22.99
Publisher Description
In an intricately linked series of poetic, short tales set in a 1983 suburb, Greg Bottoms portrays his life as one of two “at-risk” boys as they attempt to learn how to be—and what it means to be—men. By turns funny, disquieting, and moving, Fight Scenes takes an unsparing look at juvenile disaffection and the dark side of white, working-class masculinity. By narrating his experiences with childhood buddy Mark, Bottoms shows how many of America’s young men learn to think about work, sex, weakness, violence, and themselves.
In a pared-down, highly readable style that brings to mind the work of Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, and Denis Johnson, Bottoms has created a work of literature that shows how even the most accepted forms of “toughness” can have a damaging, disorienting, and finally dehumanizing effect on everyone, especially kids.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of autobiographical stories by Bottoms (Angelhead) is set in the world of suburban strip malls circa 1983. These coming-of-age vignettes (accompanied by Powell's gritty chapter illustrations) feature Bottoms as a 12-year-old from in southeastern Virginia who's become attached to his buddy Mark and to Mark's divorced father, Bill, a macho, profane, hard-living construction worker: "He made me want to drink, to have command over women, to get good at all of it, to tell these kinds of stories, to be a man." Left to their own devices, Greg and Mark spend the summer getting high, drinking beer at abandoned construction sites, trying to avoid the town bully and navigating their first crushes ("I imagined us from above as if we were in a movie a movie in which we were about to have hot, carefully lit, and musically accompanied sex and I wasn't almost a foot shorter than she was and my muscles were bigger and I didn't have braces or a first peppering of zits"). This collection is filled with short, humorous scenes and pitch-perfect, sex-obsessed adolescent dialogue that illuminate a boy's uneasy journey toward adulthood.
