Greetings from Below

November 15, 2010
Mullins's rawly confessional debut, set mostly in Las Vegas and San Francisco, follows the plight of self-described coward Nick, from his early sexual awakening and betrayal of a friend in "Arboretum," through the witnessing of his wife's adulterous encounter, in "First Sight." The death of Nick's father permeates the stories, rendering the boy at age 14 acutely sensitive and eager to be loved, even if it's by the gruff, one-legged bully Travis Kilburg or, later, in "Longing to Love You," by Annie, a San Francisco waitress he doesn't love but marries, anyway, because she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, after the death of his father, Nick's mother slips into a morass of addictions that force a grown Nick to return home in "Glitter Gulch"; he ends up stealing her casino winnings and spending them on a stripper. Nick is plagued with moral-ethical shortcomings, and though it's hard to believe him when he tells his mother, "I'm trying to save your life," his fallibility grates because it feels real, and by the last story, the reader is left with an uncomfortable feeling of collusion.

January 1, 2011
Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Mullins novel, in the form of linked short stories, charts the sexual coming-of-ageand then someof protagonist Nick Danze. Growing up in some of the seamier precincts of Las Vegas, Nick is a walking, talking libido who seems to learn little from a multiplicity of sexual encounters and fixations. Beginning with an adolescent experiment in kissingand then somewith his best friend, Kilburg (the one with the artificial leg), Nick quickly moves on to hiring call girls, visiting strip clubs, obsessing over obese women, andabove allcheating on his girlfriend and later wife. Throughout, Nick feels a familiar, hovering emptiness that the author captures and conveys to the reader with a reasonable degree of art. Theres nothing terribly new in this depressing cycle of sexual-awakening stories, but now that Mullins has them out of his system, he shows promise of better things to come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)