Dallas Hudgens

I loved this book. It captures all the typical guy obsessions -- baseball. professional athletes, and videogames (predominantly Madden NFL). The basic premise is that the manager of an amateur baseball team experiences the death of his friend/teammate in the midst of a game, and then he's left to clean up the mess his friend had made of his life. The biggest challenge is to track down the bat that Babe Ruth used in the 1932 World Series, during which he reportedly called a home run by pointing to the outfield where he planned to hit it. The dead friend had managed to get his hand on the bat, which is expected to be worth several million dollars, so the main character, Joe Rice, has to retrieve it to help the dead man's now heavily indebted wife, while contending with a Mob-tied family who'd like to keep it for themselves. There is a lot of humor here, wonderful characterizations, and very touching moments, but none too sentimental, in keeping with the macho attitude most of the characters try to cop. Joe has a very attentive relationship with his girlfriend's 12-year-old son, but their way of connecting is to trade profanity-laced trash talk while competing at the Madden game. There's a particularly poignant moment when Joe runs into one of the boy's teachers at his school. The teacher is concerned because the boy is doing poorly -- a situation Joe can sympathize with because he was never much of a student either. When the teacher asks him a few simple questions, Joe gets nervous and feels put on the spot, flashing back to the moments when he felt put on the spot by teachers everyday. In a funny Sopranos-like moment, Joe tries to use a big word to impress the teacher, but uses the word "progeny" when he means prodigy. It's a very funny demonstration of how men never really grow up, but it also has some very touching examinations of men's relationship with women. I highly recommend if you're looking for something well written but also immensely entertaining. Some of the funniest observations come when Joe draws parallels between managing a baseball game to handling people and challenging situations in his life. (A great video of the author reading from this book appears here: http://forum-network.org/lecture/dallas-hudgens-season-gene)… (mehr)

I was excited to learn of this story collection because Dallas Hudgens wrote two of my favorite novels, Drive Like Hell and Season of Gene. Both are great comic novels and I put the latter in my "holy trilogy" of great portraits of male camaraderie along with the film Diner and Tom Perrotta's novel The Wishbones. But here Hudgens departs from the comic to offer darker and often tragic portraits of down and out characters. Many of them are isolated because of failed relationships or personal tragedies. Interestingly many of them have special circumstances that enable them to avoid a typical 9 to 5 work life but their lack of jobs only adds to their isolation, which they generally use alcohol or drugs to deal with. While that may seem depressing, the book is far from the bleak portraits offered by Denis Johnson or Donald Ray Pollock. Most of the characters are still leading middle class lives - albeit on the lower end -- and Hudgens comic touch still lightens things when necessary. He writes clean crisp sentences that always ring true and are chockful of insightful observations. All of these pieces are straightforward, well-told tales, without any of the experimental or surrealistic entries some short story writers like to add to the mix (and which I'm happy to see absent here!)

The 10 stories in the collection are:

1. Target - 21 pp - A man who's a musician and con artist has to deal with a botched attempt to run a scam at a department store and a recently discovered daughter who has a crippling fear of getting caught in a flash flood.

2. Stella - 16 pp - A lonely woman visits a bar on her 48th birthday and develops an unlikely and unexpected relationship with her car mechanic.

3. Hand Job - 28 pp - The first of the stories in the collection with a protagonist that resembles those of Hudgens' brilliant 2 novels, as a smart alecky, live by his own code gambler and failed entrepreneur gets caught up in a scheme with his ex-wife's new, religious husband into rescuing a Chinese girl who was brought to the United States to work in a massage parlor.

4. Snowflake Chandelier - 17 pp - A young couple's marriage goes awry when a patient of the husband, who is a marriage counselor, commits suicide.

5. Medicine - 9 pp -- A man is dying and his only caretaker is his granddaughter, a druggie who steals his pain medication.

6. Zamboni - 31 pp - A blow-your-socks-off good story about an inarticulate lug and loner who tries to find his way in the world and deal with the memories of caring for his dying mother and his bittersweet memories of his father, a former semi-pro hockey player who abandoned his wife and child years before. You'll be shocked to see how much sympathy you feel for this violence-prone lug.

7. Velour - 19 pp - A man who always tried to lead a good life gets thrown off course when he discovers a stowed-away videotape of his wife having sex with another man right before they got married. He moves out and starts drinking non-stop while his wife and 15-year-old daughter try to reel him back in.

8. As Sounding Brass - 20 pp - A man who has to care for his crazed father befriends a young mother who has her own crazed person to deal with - her ex-boyfriend and father of her child who is now stalking her.

9. The Palace of Weariness - 16 pp - A guy who doesn't have to work because of a lawsuit settlement is chased out of his house by his wife who's tired of seeing him sitting around and doing nothing. After lying that he's found a job to keep busy, he starts hanging around the nursing home where his grandmother lives and there he meets a sexy and reckless nurse who takes him on a wild adventure.

10. The Scavenger's Daughter - 58 pp - A beautifully written and moving novella about a woman who's in a tailspin after her teenaged daughter committed suicide. After her marriage collapses, she forms a touching and unlikely friendship with a young man, barely a few years older than her daughter was when she died, who shares her daughter's taste in heavy metal music and who's lived through his own share of tragedies. (The title comes from a torture device showcased in the Tower of London that crushed people like a trash compactor.)… (mehr)