Thank You for Being Concerned and Sensitive
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Jim Henry’s stories defy convention. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes. Although the plots vary—from a corpse returning to visit his family weeks after his burial, to the musings of a congressman grappling with the weight of history, to a wealthy family’s elaborate plot to cheer their mysteriously wounded mother—all express a sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the absurd in the everyday.
Henry’s characters are for the most part misfits, outsiders looking in on a world whose seemingly natural order is turned upside down. In a throw-away culture obsessed with sex and drugs, money and God, they struggle to connect with what is real while trying to convince themselves that anything is. And yet in the midst of their existential searching there remains always Henry’s quirky sense of humor. As one character says, “Anything is possible,” and in this collection anything and everything happens.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawn in rapid dry-point strokes, the characters in this Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning collection are a motley bunch of thoroughly contemporary oddballs and rogues: trust-fund alcoholics and struggling immature couples, epistemologically challenged legislators and dead dads returned to taunt sexually repressed moms, child-voyeurs and copy-shop Samaritans. Henry adores finely calibrated ironies, which means that when he's good, he's terrific (in the Award citation, judge Ann Beattie compares him to Donald Barthelme); but when he's off, his overly oblique epiphanies feel as if they should come with footnotes. This drawback is especially evident in "Jesus," the collection's lost-in-Manhattan tale: rather than conclude, the story quietly wipes out, cheapening the dread with which Henry has labored to suffuse matters. Much better are the girl-boy sketches that take up the bulk of these dozen tales. "The Earthling!" unites conspiracy theories with social critique to delightful effect. "Mouthfeel"--the collection's standout--abandons workshop pyrotechnics for the careful accumulation of details, in this case details of a marriage's premature decay. Henry is a bracing satirist whose offbeat take on our culture is refreshing.
