Banjo Grease
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Descripción editorial
The author of Brother Carnival and The World’s Smallest Bible examines small-town life in this collection of sixteen stories.
There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naiveté for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?
“These stories float through the reader like frozen images. Each one fits into the others unevenly as jagged glass. This is the essence of great fiction at the end of the century; Ray Carver and Thom Jones plowed into some stupendous force that whips along with a tilted wild energy.” —Kate Gale, author of The Goldilocks Zone
“Dennis Must’s first collection of short stories is no ordinary debut but the mature work of a fully accomplished literary artist. Moreover, his originality, his deep irreverence, and his compassion for working-class men and women . . . Strivers and seekers of dreams, signal him as an inspired author in a new American grain―a visionary, poet, and realist.” —Tom Jenks, cofounder and editor, Narrative Magazine
“Dennis Must’s stunning collection Banjo Grease is just what one hopes for: a series of intriguing, interlocking stories whose cumulative force goes beyond the sum of its parts.”— Geoffrey Clark, author of Two, Two, Lily-White Boys
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Almost half of the 16 stories in Must's debut collection feature Westley Daugherty, a young man living in blue-collar, 1960s Hebron, Pa., but while this character and setting become familiar, the book still lacks cohesion. In the opening story, "Escape," Daugherty affects both the high-flown vocabulary of the Harvard Divinity school student he hopes to be (Must himself studied theology) and the dialect of the country bumpkin he really is. Initially, the young man refers to his parent as "Father," but gives himself away when he slips into the vernacular "Pap." While such a shift might indicate Daugherty's uncertainty and his search for identity, it is a trademark of undeveloped characters throughout the collection. The title story describes Westley's surprise visit to the trailer home of his Aunt Min and Uncle George, who run the Skyline Drive-In Theatre. Sketchy details of his relatives' lives are offered piecemeal, none of them adding up to a full picture of the couple: the book's title is gleaned from an awkward anecdote about Min and George's genitalia burned by "banjo grease." Piano prodigy Buddy Hart stars in two entries, which both suffer from awkward phrasing, obscuring the obvious question of whether the kid will make the big time or not. The focus of the quirky and original "Big Whitey" is on Cyrus Quinn, a downtrodden man who finds a mentor at his new job cooking burgers at a White Castle. Much of the dialogue in this story is satisfyingly humorous, although this tale, too, is rife with murky moments that drain the protagonist of his credibility. Themes of castration, genital maiming and the Madonna/whore stereotype keep the book's male protagonists occupied, but the fragmented, meandering prose drains these obsessions of their potential psychological power.
