American Fiction, Short Story Collections (Single Author), African Americans - Fiction & Literature

Gigantic

Name: Gigantic
Author: Marc Nesbitt
ISBN: 9780802139634

by Marc Nesbitt

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

Marc Nesbitt, selected by The New Yorker as a 2001 Debut Fiction Writer, is a startlingly original talent whose bold, muscular prose and haunting, vivid imagery charge his debut collection, Gigantic. These are ten powerful stories of emotional stagnation and personal transformation, passion and violence, race and community, viscerally immediate in their impact and otherworldly in their scope. Each story brings to life a range of young characters existing on the edge of society — and hovering on the brink of madness. In "The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning," a young hand at an industrial magnate's country estate is made to dress up as a human lawn jockey for his employer's party, where a romantic liaison with the man's daughter begets a chain of events that unfolds to a shattering climax. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a struggling mattress salesman witnesses a horrific car accident at his bus stop and embarks on a wild journey that leads him to decide to put his life in order, beginning with his troubled relationship with his disabled alcoholic father. In "Quality Fuel for Electric Living" a sanitation worker, recovering from a romantic breakup and a painful hangover, suddenly faces a life-threatening situation while collecting an unusual deer carcass. In "Man in Towel with Gun," a graduate student and poet searches for his missing girlfriend among her friends, ex-lovers, and the bars of New York, only to uncover things about himself and their relationship that he is unprepared to face. In "Thursday the Sixteenth" a club manager dating the ex-girlfriend of a reggae singer unwittingly becomes entangled in a chain of events that ends in a violent confrontation. At turns comicand heartbreaking, and at all times rich with language and meanings that operate simultaneously on a variety of levels, the ten stories of Gigantic mark the arrival of an exciting new voice in American fiction.

Synopsis

An extraordinary collection of dynamic stories by an exciting new voice in American fiction, Gigantic features ten powerful stories of emotional stagnation and personal transformation, passion and violence, race and community, that are viscerally immediate in their impact and otherworldly in their scope. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a struggling mattress salesman witnesses a horrific car accident at his bus stop and embarks on a wild journey that will lead him to put his life in order, beginning with his troubled relationship with his disabled alcoholic father. In "Quality Fuel for Electric Living," a sanitation worker, recovering from a romantic breakup and a painful hangover, suddenly faces a life-threatening situation while collecting an unusual deer carcass. In "Thursday the Sixteenth," a club manager dating the ex-girlfriend of a reggae singer unwittingly becomes entangled in a chain of events that ends in a violent confrontation. At turns comic and heartbreaking, and at all times rich with language and meanings that operate simultaneously on a variety of levels, the stories of Gigantic mark the arrival of an exciting voice in American fiction. "Impressive ... Ten lean and energetic stories ... Grimly funny, bleakly fatalistic, and emotionally true all at once." -- Chris Lehman, The Washington Post "Beautiful ... Nesbitt is smart, dark, and funny, like a young Elmore Leonard with a drinking problem." -- Sam Sifton, The New York Times Book Review "Nesbitt takes risks. ... with imagery, details of his characters' dead-end lives and even with structure.... Wonderful ... A talent to watch." -- David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "Nesbitt sets out to blow his readers away with his debut collection.... He succeeds.... Funny, tense and horrifying." -- Carole Goldberg, The Hartford Courant

Book Magazine

The ten stories that make up Nesbitt's first book present a world where no one is really in control of anything: their passions, their future, their vehicles. Nesbitt offers a lot of wreckage and carnage but no one willing to take responsibility for the mess, not even the author. The prose is a loose amalgam of sentence fragments and one-liners that seem to have been written over time in a worn notebook kept in a pocket. The sometimes vague and directionless story lines seem like afterthoughts. Nesbitt's language has the ease of a casual conversation. The stories themselves suggest a wild, violent reality, moving freely between slapstick and tragedy, calm and calamity. Nesbitt's protagonists tend to be cool victims of outrageous situations, caught in a web of hoary chaos and left a little loony for it. The collection recalls something John Keats once wrote: "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."
—Kevin Greenberg

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

From The Critics

Publishers Weekly

In this clever, raucous debut collection, intriguing newcomer Nesbitt offers 10 stories that explore a hard, racially charged world, bitterness and compassion vying for top billing. The first story, "The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning," sets the tone with its tale of class and racial warfare on the huge estate of a processed-meat magnate ("His baloney has a first name and it's his"). After the young black narrator endures a humiliating job as a glorified lawn ornament he's dressed up in a jockey's outfit to welcome guests he finds himself sought out by the magnate's white daughter for some slumming sex. This thinly veiled rebellion against her father doesn't last long, and the situation soon deteriorates into violence. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a young man offers this frank assessment of living with his alcoholic father: "We're like most fathers and sons: not much to say, never live up to the other's expectations." Still, he's drawn to his father's ne'er-do-well friends, who together started a black fraternity back in college. In "Man in Towel with Gun," a man takes on a sad and hilarious quest to find his girlfriend, who seems to have disappeared from their house on short notice. If the other stories don't hold together as well as these, Nesbitt's idiosyncratic voice, his sharp-tongued observations and his convincing, colloquial dialogue communicate a unique and arresting worldview. (Mar. 2) Forecast: Nesbitt, a standout among this year's crop of new writers, has been published in the New Yorker and Harper's. That exposure, and an eight-city author tour, should help Gigantic make a strong showing. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A common sense of aimlessness, apathy, and confusion, exhibited by Nesbitt's young African American characters, is the thread that ties these stories together. At their best as in the zoo misadventures of "Gigantic" or "The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning," where human lawn jockeys take revenge on the fat cat who hired them for a dinner party the stories move with some energy, but the majority lose their way and disintegrate into bull sessions that have the strange distinction of being quirky yet dull at the same time. Most feel ditheringly similar, with little contrast between the people who inhabit them, making for a rather colorless reading experience. The voices of the characters do more to exhibit the author's cleverness than to illuminate their humanity. Nesbitt's work has been published in The New Yorker and Harper's, and the average reader will probably be better off reading Nesbitt in those small doses. Not recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/01.] Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A first collection from a young author whose work has appeared in Harper's and the New Yorker, where he was featured as a 2001 Debut Fiction Writer. Nesbitt's ten stories have appealingly cryptic titles such as "Chimp Shrink & Backwards" and "Man in Towel with Gun," and each presents a wry, sometimes helpless, always young black male narrator. Often these protagonists find themselves in boring but amusing occupations: cleaning up a deer carcass in "Quality Fuel for Electric Living"; running a volatile nightclub in "Thursday the 16th"; or working at a second-tier zoo in the title story. Sometimes-as in "The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning," about "The Help" at an obnoxious rich man's party-these situations lead to danger or confrontation, but most of the pieces feel unresolved. From their "weird" environments, Nesbitt's narrators deliver ironic jabs at the world: one has a girlfriend who "kisses like a mule biting a carrot," while another opens his tale by saying, "My dad lost his left leg, so he has to drive an automatic." Such comic lines are sometimes right-on; more often than not, though, they fall flat-a flatness compounded by the fact that all ten narrators sound identical. They usually drink too much, but they seem to do this not out of need but because their author couldn't contrive anything else for them to do. Still, the monotony of character is not the problem here: the real difficulty is that in the absence of well-drawn characters, your attention naturally shifts to the plot; and in the absence of anything coherent or dramatic happening in these stories, your attention shifts to the style. Nesbitt's style, though often bold and winning, can't carry the whole load, and sothe most engaging aspect of this collection is its titles. A disappointment, especially for a debut writer with such publishing credentials. First printing of 30,000; author tour