Review: Simple, Beautiful, Eloquent
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 20, 2012
Jay Finn is a young writer, apparently from England if we are to believe that these two short stories are from his own memories, who opens his talent to the public with two short stories.  His technique is straightforward, gently ordered, immensely readable. The content is about the tougher questions we face - those of life and death in various metaphors.The Girl in the Blue Dress is the relating of a memory than the writer feels compelled to share, at least that is how he elects to begin his series of memories - childhood perceptions of his height, the years progressing until he is taller than some girls, meeting a girl who pays attention to him and then we are on a speedway of circumstances that begin a falling in love adventure and progress to the physical aspects of passion and lead to a pregnancy that the two - our writer and his Katie - decide to end.  From there the pain of their decision allows the relationship to gradually end and our writer turns to a lonely life, only to encounter a dream state that restores his memory of a deed he wishes never occurred.  The manner in which he shares this story is brief but so rich in experiential sameness that the reader cannot help but weep with him.The Presence of Nothing is a sweet elegy for a grandfather passing, that sort of reliving of a meaningful past that comes so acutely into focus as we watch a loved on die.Jay Finn takes us to places many of us avoid - those matters of the heart, memories of a past we cannot change - and in sharing these in such lovely prose he offers us each a pathway to finding the ability to ask for forgiveness for those moments os pain we may have elicited.  This is fine writing form a young man with a talent that feels quite secure.  Grady Harp, March 12