Matty’s Heart by C. J. Hribal
1986; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1986.0137
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
Resumo168 Western American Literature its overage heroes involved in gunplay, chases, saucy amorous dalliance and sentimental partings, The Old Colts has the earmarks not so much of a novel as of a film scenario for the likes of Robert Mitchum, who began his career as a gunslinger in old Hopalong Cassidy movies, and Burt Lancaster, who in fact played Wyatt Earp in the 1957 Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. KENNETH W. SCOTT Long Island University Matty’s Heart. By C. J. Hribal. (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985. 101 pages, $6.00.) This volume of short stories is published as part of the Minnesota Voices Project. The casual reader who did not know that the author was a young man might be justifiably confused by the point-of-view ventriloquism repre sented by the half-dozen slices of middle-American life: an older woman, the Matty of the title story and of the concluding story “Kitchens,” tells her own account of being held hostage for a time in a local restaurant;Luther, a farmer of similar age whose sons have turned out badly and whose wife is dead, tells his own story, before being portrayed again in “Kitchens” as Matty’s lover; an adolescent girl, a diver, tells her story of initiation in “Stephers” ; a young woman leaves her hippie lover freezing and naked beside a spring lake in “Lake Poygan and the Politics of Departure,” in some ways the most accom plished of these stories, though not the most ambitious. The voices are impres sively varied and convincing, the language is assured, and the author’s tone mature and sympathetic. The pyrotechnics of point of view tend to call atten tion to themselves, and the point of some of the stories, particularly several very short sketches, seems obscure. It seems likely that these problems will disappear in the novel that the author is now writing about the title character, who is a fine and vigorous creation. ANTHONY ARTHUR California State University, Northridge Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place. By John Haines. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. 188 pages, $7.95 paper.) The decline of contemporary poetry results from a failure on the part of the writer to look outward, according to poet and critic John Haines in his collection of essays, Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place. From the out-looking work of major writers such as Stevens, Frost and Williams, American poetry has declined past the self-centered introversions of Plath, ...
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