Hope Springs Eternal

Page 24 American Book Review the fetishized suture of a stump, the book suggests that a true loss of humanity accompanies only the refusal to ask questions, no matter how absurd, of what constitutes the human condition. Robert Glick is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah and fiction editor of the Amsterdam-based literary journal Versal. His short fiction has appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review and Passages North. Glick continued from previous page function is to gather information, must become the trigger for violence. A detective novel, as a prelude to bloodshed, simply cannot retain the sensibilities of a detective novel. Furthermore, Last Days needs the different mechanisms of violence in the two novellas in order to tease out the flawed logic implicit in our understanding of what keeps us human. Our apprehension of the joke—the pathetic, useless act of balancing fewer graphic acts of bloodshed against vague, multiple acts—reflects both our culpability in exercising judgment and our understanding that any simple notion of humanity has been subsumed by the fact of having already fallen. In Last Days, we know not only that carnage is coming, but also that we are implicated in that carnage. Nonetheless, we continue to read. It is an auto-mutilatory bind that reshapes our notion of humanity not as something absent or present (as minus-one or plus-one) but as a presence overwriting a forced absence; as the static that remains on the audiotape of Kline’s interview questions over the answered passages that have been removed. While some will dismiss Last Days as a gratuitous ode to violence that locates the human condition at Hope Springs Eternal Terry Dalrymple Perpetual Care James Nolan Jefferson Press http://www.jeffersonpress.com 228 pages; paper, $16.95 Perpetual Care, James Nolan’s first book of fiction and winner of the 2007 Jefferson Press Prize, comprises sixteen fine short stories, most of them darkly comic, some of them deadly serious, all of them poignantly delivered. Set predominately in New Orleans and occasionally in San Francisco, the stories depict worlds in which hope springs eternal, a kind of desperate hope that mostly withers just as eternally under the cold glare of historical, geographical , cultural, and personal realities. In this literary menagerie of Southern grotesques , dark humor abounds. Peter Cordero of “The Immortalist” returns to San Francisco to scatter the ashes of his friend Limmel Rock who, ironically, believed he would live forever by eating the right foods, by not smoking, drinking, or having sex, and by spending “most of the day sunk in the tub” to avoid the effects of gravity. As Peter attempts to scatter his friend’s remains off the point at Land’s End, the inland wind delivers him a mouthful of Limmel’s ashes. Derwood Weems, protagonist of “La Vie En Rose Construction Co.,” strikes up a relationship with a big, hairy, bald, eyebrow-less transvestite plumber named Earl. In “Lucille LeBlanc’s Last Stand,” Celestine has “kept order and cooked grillades among the squawking eccentricities of six Creole brothers and sisters, none of whom ever married or held a job.” When the story opens, she has remained lying on the parlor floor for three weeks. These characters are typical of the individuals who inhabit Nolan’s stories, and most elicit smiles, even chuckles, but rarely full-blown laughter because they are true grotesques in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor: physically, spiritually, or emotionally broken human beings whose hearts are in conflict with themselves. Most frequently, they cannot resolve their conflicts as they might wish. Reminiscing about his first wife, Janice, who died young in a car crash, Lieutenant Vincent Parnarello, narrator of “Open Mike,” observes, “The life I really wanted was the one I planned with her. The life I settled for is the one I got.” He speaks for a majority of characters in this collection, but their settling for the lives they got can drive them to death, madness, addiction, and denial. BouBou Glapion of “Why Isn’t Everything Where It Used to Be?” marries for the first time at fifty-nine, retires, and spends six years...