A Primitive Heart

August 1, 2005
Playwright Rabe (Hurlyburly
, etc.), in this collection, navigates the troubled lives of men set adrift by economic hopelessness, traumatic childhoods and their own inability to connect. The narrator of the title story becomes obsessed with the development of his unborn child, even as he drifts further apart from his strong-willed wife. "Veranda" describes both the failed beginning of a new relationship and a failed attempt to make amends to a child for the end of an old one. "Holy Men" and "Some Loose Change" stand out as powerful evocations of contemporary manhood, the former in a successful writer's fraught reunion with the Catholic priest who mentored him, the latter through the attempts of a group of boozy dot-com casualties to even an old financial score. "Early Madonna," the only story with a female protagonist, features an aging club kid attempting to escape the shadow of her brainy younger sister. Abstracted inner monologues and minute descriptions sometimes come at the expense of pacing and dialogue in these often multi-chaptered first-person stories, and the solipsism of Rabe's emotionally immature characters blinds them to the reality of their interaction with others. But these stories—occasionally tedious but also marked by strikingly good observational prose—perceptively sketch the experiences of 21st-century misfits. Agent, Deborah Schneider
.