The Surf Guru

May 31, 2010
Dorst's acclaimed debut, Alive in Necropolis, folded sci-fi, horror, and noir elements into a layered coming-of-age story, and a similar mix of lively imagination and love of craft are on display in this excellent collection. "Splitters" hilariously recreates a scholarly treatise, replete with bloated footnotes and period photographs, by a biologist unloading personal grudges upon colleagues. In the title story, dozens of short vignettes have the effect of snapshots or glimpses that the reader is challenged to piece together. A similar method is used, but to a grander effect, in "Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gauchet," which borrows its title from a Van Gogh painting and depicts the life of the famous artist's physician. The narrative in the poignant and surprisingly suspenseful "Dinaburg's Cake" coils in the obsessive mind of its protagonist, a cake maker in pursuit of a lost client with whom she imagines a significant connection. Whether it's the campaign adviser shackled to a loser in "The Candidate in Bloom" or the hapless dreamers in "Vikings" and "What Is Mine Will Know My Face," the humanity in Dorst's characters can break a reader's heart.

Starred review from July 1, 2010

Dorst's second book, following his debut novel Alive in Necropolis (2008), is a varied, inventive collection of stories.

The title tale, told in fragments, is equal parts rueful and playful, and features a surfing legend turned surfwear king who sits alone on his bluffside deck watching his customers (or, seen another way, his congregants) in the swells below—he's keeping an eye on his legacy, and maybe even rooting for it to unravel. A radically different story-in-snapshots, "Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet," follows Van Gogh's decline through the eyes of a personal physician who's part quack and part groupie. In "Vikings," two drifters on the lam stumble into a desert town where they find themselves out of money, out of time, out of patience...and in possession, suddenly and inexplicably, of a baby abandoned by a stranger. Rarely in debut story collections does a writer succeed in showing versatility and range without the book devolving into a miscellany, but Dorst expertly manages the feat. He attempts a Nabokovian trick of unreliable narration in "Splitters," a vengeful botanist's field guide to all the fellow botanists who screwed him over in life. In "Dinaburg's Cake," a baker grows dangerously obsessed with a lost wedding-cake commission, and meanwhile grapples with how to help her teen daughter, who's ripping out her own hair one strand at a time. Some stories—for instance, the magnificently odd meditation on war called "The Monkeys Howl, the Hagfish Feast" and the contemporary-campaign riff "The Candidate in Bloom"—offer a brand of magical realism. "Jumping Jacks," about a childhood accident involving fireworks, is a brief, lyrical, bittersweet reflection on the moment where a life went wrong (but oh man, was it beautiful). Still others ("Astronauts") have the humor, tragicomedy and slightly giddy downbeat feel of Denis Johnson's short fiction.

In this funny, poignant, risk-taking and mostly splendid collection, Dorst confirms the promise of his acclaimed first novel.

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July 1, 2010
Dorst (Alive in Necropolis, 2008) consistently finds the sweet spot between humor and pathos in this well-crafted and compulsively readable collection of 12 short stories. Whether its the wildly successful surfer tycoon who surveys the Pacific from his redwood deck or the hopelessly hungover house sitter who has badly bungled the tests that will allow her to hit the open road in a semitrailer truck, Dorsts characters all share a deep yearning for a different, better life. In the nerve-jangling Dinaburgs Cake, an expert cake-maker in Austin, Texas, loses the bid to make a wedding cake. Her obsessive quest to sample the winning cake brings her unexpected but welcome insight into her depressed and mangy daughter, whom she loved more than anything. In Vikings, two childhood friends drift into a small desert town, where they end up taking care of an abandoned baby. Their touching if ridiculous dream of becoming a family hits the skids as soon as the beer runs out. Recommend this imaginative and compelling collection to fans of Wells Towers Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)