Nebraska by Ron Hansen
1989; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1989.0049
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Humor Studies
ResumoReviews 173 Nebraska. By Ron Hansen. (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. 193 pages, $16.95.) The eleven short stories in this collection, Ron Hansen’s first, will not disappoint readers who come expecting the stylistic felicities of Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Although none but the initial “Wickedness” works with the western past as the novels do, all but three of the stories (“The Killers,” “The Sun So Hot I Froze to Death,” and “The Boogeyman”) evoke essences of plains life; their cumulative effect is to connect past and present, rural and urban, with a chorus of distinctive voices ranging from Avis, a black psychic reader, to Riva, a pot-smoking ranch wife, to Cecil, a retired lawyer and continuing golf fanatic. Those stories not set on the plains are connected to the others by motifs such as the gothic, and mythical surrealism. Hansen has obviously set out to diversify his fictional modes and subjects, and for some readers he will have succeeded all too well in so brief a volume, yet all but a couple of these stories are fine work, never facile, and even the ambiguous and surreal effects are well earned. The collection is framed by two sober and realistic stories, the wonderful “Wickedness” portraying through brief vignettes the human responses to the blizzard of 1888, and “Nebraska” profiling a nameless small town wherein “Everyone is famous. . . . And everyone is necessary,” and wherein one finds a summary of the people and their ostensibly mundane reality from which Hansen in the intervening stories has made such startling effects. “Playland,” a 1920’s courtship story at an agricultural exhibit site turned into an amuse ment park, metamorphoses into a surreal vision of an erotic paradise, its Adam and Eve besieged at the end by an intruder who carries passion’s worst savag ery. In “Sleepless,” Hansen uses Avis’s psychic probings to construct a multi layered plot that becomes a gothic nightmare, but which ultimately concerns the complicated responses inherent in racial integration. Likewise, stories such as “True Romance” and “Can I Just Sit Here for a While” explore inner reality by making the visible world manifest its tensions: a calf mutilated in utero, the aftershocks of a parking-lot argument. Hansen works hard to create fiction outside the mimetic tradition that has dominated western writing, and in taking big chances, he occasionally gets shallow and silly, as in “His Dog” and “The Sun So Hot I Froze to Death.” On the whole, however, Nebraska is a strong collection. And charming: who has not wondered what happened after Max and A1left the diner that evening in Hemingway’s“The Killers”? KERRY AHEARN Oregon State University ...
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