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Synopsis
Warm, gentle, funny, sometimes sad, these twelve stories weave common themes into a variety of patterns, each distinctive and yet related to the rest. Those themes - the humor and folktales of the rural Midwest, the bonds between generations and the friction those bonds create, the tensions between a character's country past and city present - are at once archetypically American and specific to each story's particular reality. In "Melting with Ruth," a visit home becomes an unlooked-for courtship of an unlikely sweetheart, culminating in a thoroughly unexpected new life. "Storying You" listens in on a yarn-spinning session among old and practiced (and somewhat slanderous) tall-tale tellers. And, in the story that gives the collection its name, the narrator recalls his grandfather, a man "strong and proud as a bull," who nonetheless teaches him that there is more than one way to be a man, not all of which involve fishing. As the title suggests, many of the stories in Fishing for Ghosts have to do with remembrance and loss, and as Richard Brown points out in the book's foreword, it will sometimes be natural for the reader to confuse the narrators with the author. But none of these stories are purely autobiographical; rather, Brown infuses his storytelling with the authenticity of his own experiences, and the result is a narrative voice that is genuine, playful, as rich as the good Missouri soil it springs from, and absolutely his own.
Publishers Weekly
Reconciling the forces of the past with their often intangible impact on the present is the common theme that unites the 12 stories in this uneven collection. Brown, an English professor at the University of Nevada, extrapolates from his own Missouri upbringing to explore the Midwestern origins of his characters, some of whom are transported intact from his first novel, Chester's Last Stand . When he's on, the author captures the feel of the rural landscape, along with the small events that shaped both lives and character on the family farm during the post-war era. When he's off, the prose turns alternately flat and mawkish, and it often seems as if the author is writing about characters whose lives are foreign to him, as in ``Bird Song.'' The best effort here is ``Melting With Ruth,'' a moving, poignant account of an L.A. photographer who returns to Missouri to be with a woman from his childhood who's on the edge of spinsterhood. Other successful pieces include ``Marked by the Lamb,'' about a young boy whose family is steering him into a religious career and ``The Devil You Don't Know'' in which a young, naively ambitious Marxist journalist is ``accidentally'' elected mayor of a small cattle town. Mining a vein that's been tapped by writers from Washington Irving to William Kittredge, this collection should please readers with a bent for rural fiction. (Feb.)