Letting Loose the Hounds
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| Reviewed by: Andrew R. Hall, 4 September 2001. | |
More of the same good stuff. That’s the main point I want to express in this review. I don’t have a lot to say here that I didn’t say in my review of Udall’s novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. I loved the novel, and I love these stories. A lot of the same themes can be found: pain from the loss of loved-ones, the creation of new family-type bonds with others, and saviors. Udall is a great writer who packs a great deal of heart into his work. He creates characters (most of them male) that I quickly began to care about, he has a great eye for humor, and flat-out tells wonderful stories.
The stories can be divided into two groups, the first about regular people who try to break out of the monotony of their lives to achieve something greater. The second group are about misfits on the fringe of society who are on the verge of doing something desperate. One story from the first group is “The Opposite of Loneliness,” a lovely story about a man creating a family out of the members of a halfway house for mentally challenged adults. Udall uses familiar tropes of “happy family” stories, and places them among this more unfamiliar world of mentally disturbed people. A story representative of the second group is “He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk,” about a young delinquent sent to work on a ranch. In part through the help of his friend, a Mexican ranch hand, he is able to expel a lifetime chunk of hatred he has carried around, and forgive a man who destroyed his family years before in a drunken, foolish act.
A word of warning, some of the stories (mostly the ones about the misfit characters) have R-rated situations and language. But the nature of the material is very different from, say, the R-rated stories/play of Brian Evenson and Neil LaBute. When I read the stories by those two authors, which reveal the evil lurking inside all kinds of people, I am impressed by their skill, but I come out feeling dirty and unhappy, and a bit incredulous. Udall’s situations and characters are much more real, much more human. For all of their rough edges, I enjoy getting to know these people. We find that there is more too them then the rough edges, that their humanity makes the rough edges unimportant, trivial. This is unlike Evenson and LaBute’s characters, who might be squeaky clean on the outside, but are full of rottenness on the inside.
The stories are all set in Arizona, except for one set in Utah, and all are told from the first person. Two of them (“Buckeye the Elder” and “Beautiful Places”) have Mormon characters, although both of those stories are told from the POV of a non-Mormon. Both are excellent stories, and both discuss the power found in association with the Church, despite situations which are far removed from the mainstream of Mormon life (they are not for the easily offended). One of the essays in the recent Dialogue issue on Mormon Literature uses “Beautiful Places” as an example of great Mormon fiction (along with Eric Sam’s Gadianton, which I also just recently read and enjoyed).
Here is a quote I like from the back cover: “Oh, have these young men ever gotten themselves into some fine messes, some bona fide predicaments. And addressing their sweet moments of extremity with a huge heart and huge humor is Mr. Brady Udall, who arrives herewith as a clear master of the misfit in the new West. Every one of Udall’s heroes has a wheel in the ditch, but three on the road!” — Ron Carlson.
A+.
Andrew Hall Wenatchee, WA