We've Already Gone This Far
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A heartfelt, vital collection; the debut of an exciting new talent already hailed as one of George Saunders' "favorite young American writers"
In Patrick Dacey's stunning debut, we meet longtime neighbors and friends--citizens of working-class Wequaquet--right when the ground beneath their feet has shifted in ways they don't yet understand. Here, after more than a decade of boom and bust, love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor's veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town, a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged. We've Already Gone This Far takes us to a town like many towns in America, a place where people are searching for what is now an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream
Story by story, Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers and reminds us that life's strange intensity and occasional magic is all around us, especially in the everyday. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: a deeply-felt, deeply-imagined book about where we've been and how far we have to go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dacey's debut story collection chronicles the economically and emotionally struggling residents of a Massachusetts town, Wequaquet. Despite the exhausted, drained characters, these tales of neighborly conflicts, professional and personal malaise, and family tragedy are marked by a certain buoyancy. In describing these frustrated lives, Dacey can be as funny as he is compassionate. A retired football coach overzealously guards his gazanias ("Friend of Mine"); a married high school teacher is drawn to an old flame who has become a sexual healer ("Frieda, Years Later"); an alcoholic chaperones his unstable young son on a date ("To Feel Again the Kind of Love That Hurts Something Terrible"); a woman undergoes extensive plastic surgery ("Mutatis Mutandis"). The stories are less lurid and violent than those in Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff, another promising debut collection about small-town American life, though darkness does creep in: "Bad things will happen. They have to. They're good for you, anyway," a father tells his son. There are some hiccups, including "Ballad," an underwhelming, unpunctuated internal monologue, and "Incoming Mail," which consists of a mother's letters to her son fighting in Iraq and strains to capture an unhip parental voice. But taken as a whole, Dacey's breakout collection shows that small towns can still yield big fictional rewards.
Customer Reviews
Enjoyable
This is the first or second of this author's books I've read. I found myself quite unsettled by the chapter called "Ballad", as it's completely unpunctuated for several pages, which reminded me of one of the things I detest about social media and sure didn't expect to encounter in a book I had paid for. I wouldn't want to read another one like that.