Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories
Traveling salesmen, small-time hustlers, hitchhikers, harried fathers, and sex-obsessed sons: Rick DeMarinis's stories take men at the end of their rope, then give them just enough line for things to get interesting. Robert Bly-style rhetoric drives a burned-out high school teacher to violence in "Wilderness"; answering a Help Wanted ad leads to disastrous results in "Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs." In charting the downward arc of their character's lives, DeMarinis's smart, self-conscious tales run the gamut from experimental fables to down-to-earth realism. In "Insulation," for example, his protagonist has a genetic predisposition for being struck by lightning; the gently naturalistic "Voice of America," on the other hand, follows a 17-year-old boy who both loves and resents his promiscuous mother and dreams "of waking up as someone else, in a different place, where things were decent."Even those stories that begin as mere narrative exercises soon turn into things greater than the sum of their parts. "Romance: A Prose Villanelle," for example, crosses the preposterous conventions of a romance novel with the strict patterning of the villanelle (the famously difficult poetic form in which two lines are repeated at intervals throughout; think "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). The results are odd, hilarious, and curiously apt: "Silence slips into the bloated prose," one repeated passage tells us. "It invades each trumped-up scene.... It is there, smirking, when you begin, there in the middle, showing a wider grin, and it waits for you at the dead end--asurpriseending of dead paper, rustling with the last word." It's difficult for fiction to interrogate itselfandengage the reader's sympathies, but DeMarinis pulls it off. InBorrowed Hearts, he shows himself one of the funniest and deadliest American writers at work today: a Flannery O'Connor for the Prozac age.--Magda Burns