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WITNESS
OF COMBINES
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press Format: Trade Paperback Accolades
for Kent Meyers |
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Endorsements
"Written with simple, poetic dignity and a savvy for the land that can only come from
having been raised up in it with eyes wide open." "Meyers,
who writes with biblical intensity, returns to the small Minnesota town
of Cloten, the setting of his novel The River Warren , in this
collection of interlocking stories. He portrays farm people who possess
an intimate understanding of death and the stoicism of those who
routinely face the unexpected: the obliteration of a blizzard, ruined
crops, a child's fatal accident. In the astonishing title story, two
bored young men play "Cornfield Roulette," racing in the dark
with their headlights off through the green tunnels late summer corn
builds over gravel roads. Violence is always in the offing, whether it's
the tough decision to shoot a beloved dog after it slaughters the
family's chickens, or the slow percolation of revenge in the fairy
tale-like "The Smell of the Deer." Attuned to the confusions
of young boys, the deep loneliness and poverty of rural life, and the
love of the land that makes it all bearable, Meyers renders midwest life
mythic in its tragedies and privations." A fine
debut collection of 12 stories, all set in rural Minnesota, by western
novelist Meyers (The River Warren, 1998). Meyers's selection of Cloten,
Minnesota, as the focal point of his narrative influences the texture as
well as the background of his tales: Cloten is little more than a
collection of adjoining farms, a flat expanse of midwestern geography
all but unknown to outsiders. Most of the lives it contains are as bleak
as the landscape, if Meyers is any guide: ``Two-Speed,'' for example, is
a funereal recollection of a mean-spirited old man who raised three
equally bad-natured sons to grow up to become the terror of the town.
``A Strange Brown Fruit'' describes a local farmboy's coming of age,
initiated by his contact with a wounded rabbit outside his parents'
house. ``Wind Rower,'' from the separate perspectives of his neighbor,
his mother, and a local fireman, portrays the freakish death of a farmer
in his thresher. ``Glacierland'' is a very moving (and aptly named)
account of a middle- aged farmer's attempt to come to terms with
mortality in the wake of his wife's death. ``Abiding by Law'' provides
an eerie diagram of Cloten's jagged connection to the outside world
through the misunderstandings that arise between local inhabitants and
German refugees whove settled in the area, and ``Bird Shadows'' offers a
highly elegiac account (``The pull of land is like a black, black tide,
a strong black moon over thick black water, water so thick one walks
upon it and carries it forever upon one's heels, water like a glue'') of
a boy who can't get away from the family farm however much he might want
to. The title story describes a rather macabre form of ``chicken''
played out on rural roads by a young man during the summer following his
father's death. A small gem: Gloomy to an extreme, but marvelously paced
and told with great restraint and practiced skill. [for THE RIVER
WARREN] Dramatic Rights: Contact Lukeman |
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