Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

Starred review from September 26, 2011
Moffett’s prize-winning (the Nelson Algren, the Pushcart, the 2010 National Magazine Award for this collection’s title story) short stories have been extensively and prestigiously published, and it’s easy to see why: Moffett’s work is melancholy and funny at the same time, with an uncanny knack for giving weighty topics (death especially, either imminent, remembered, or inevitable) a weightlessness that manages to make them graver rather than lighter. The best pieces, like the title story, about fathers and sons both biological and symbolic, touch on writing and memory and death. “One Dog Year” has John D. Rockefeller both too old to die and already dead and almost making it sky-ward; he believes that “Birth is a dream, spontaneous and innate” and death, “a slow, false, divine calamity.” Language soars in unexpected directions: “On the brink of time, when he stands at last, he sings.” And strange happenings make perfect sense as people do what they have to do to metabolize grief and its bubbly sidekick, love. When Moffett’s not at his best he gets stuck in strange mode, but it hardly matters when so many are so good. This collection will leave readers grateful to have encountered characters who are as odd as they are, as sad as they may be, and as stupidly hopeful.

March 15, 2012

In the title piece of this fine new collection by Moffett (Permanent Visitors), a young writer who specializes in stories about fathers and sons is forced to reassess all of the assumptions he's made about his past when his father begins writing stories that cover much the same territory. "In the Pines" features an old woman recently moved unwillingly to a retirement home at the edge of a battlefield who is visited by a Civil War reenactor--or is he a projection of her own imagination? "English Made Easy" deals with a young widow's anguish as she attempts to deal with the aftermath of her husband's unexpected death. "First Marriage" is about newlyweds driving a car to Florida who become stuck in the Arizona desert after an unknown animal dies in the vents. VERDICT If there's an overarching theme here, it's about the ways in which people in a state of transition struggle to find themselves in a changed world. Moffett's stories brilliantly capture the uncertainty and emotional precariousness of those moments of becoming; for fans of his fiction and the short story form.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

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