Year of Fire

September 26, 2005
Neither villainous nor devout, the characters that people Lynn's collection of 19 stories negotiate ethics and morality in a world that offers no absolutes. An obscure poet masquerades as her more celebrated colleague in "Mistaken Identity"; amid Detroit's 1967 raging race riots, a blue-blooded prep school teacher tends bar at a strip club on Eight Mile Road in the title story; a newlywed moonlights as an unfaithful vigilante in "Muggings." Kenyon Review
editor Lynn (Wrestling with Gabriel
) proffers no solutions to his characters' existential quandaries. Rather, their trials leave them "in a kind of limbo, not even probation." In a collection spanning India, England, Detroit and California, characters ponder confused, even mistaken identities in a world consumed with identity politics. Lynn also displays an adroitness with disaffected male protagonists, such as Duncan Boothe, the teacher-cum-bartender of the title story. "It was over now," Lynn writes, referring not to the race riots or to Boothe's dissolving marriage—these crises merely provide the backdrop for Boothe's central dilemma, jealousy of an awkward high school student with a fondness for Boothe's estranged wife. The stories of this collection occupy the gray borderland where betrayal mixes with trust, violence with affection, humiliation with lust. The effect is quietly haunting.

November 1, 2005
In 19 short stories, Lynn writes with virtuosity about angry people, the complexities of love and betrayal, and the effect of the past on present lives. A master of the ambivalent resolution, his stories linger and resonate after you finish them. Lynn revisits places and situations, looking at themes and culture from different points of view. Several stories take place in India; two stories are about the removal of houses from their foundations; and others examine tipping points in character's lives--minor decisions that become the pivot on which lives are changed. Among the outstanding stories are "Year of Fire," in which a man's life disintegrates as his city goes up in flames; "Balked Eclogue," a story told in the second person; and "Life Sentences," in which an English professor gets caught up in a bitter tenure dispute. There is some really brilliant writing here, most of it in the longer stories. Buy this book for your literary fiction fans and short story aficionados--they'll find it very rewarding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)