Grasshopper Falls

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A feeling for life on the Great Plains and a respect for fictional resonances lend Gilfillan's 15 stories a quiet glow. In precise, glistening prose, the poet and award-winning essayist (Chokecherry Places) presents a slim collection of vignettes that include historical anecdotes, sketches of contemporary reservation life and extended observations on the vagaries of existence. "Missouri Story" tells how two hobos, Hiram and Ferol Johnson, are caught by a farmer sleeping in his barn, and get a taste of 1902 rural brutality. In "Grasshopper Falls," an Indian family discovers an old man dying in a shack in the hills and tries to establish his identity. "Men in Shadow" is a three-part story carried by its own music, as the narrator encounters some men lazing in the shadow of a tree near the Porcupine/Wounded Knee divide in the Black Hills, telling each other tales on a hot summer day. "Uncle and Shrike" exemplifies the aesthetic that shapes these sketches. The narrator is a boy spending the summer camping with his uncle at various spots around Wyoming and Nebraska. The uncle is an elderly, literate man who is beginning to suffer from bouts of mental blankness, signaling the onset of senility. At one camp, the two hear a man describe a disaster that befell a father and son fishing in Lake Erie. Afterwards, the uncle says: "He had his hands all over that story... That's not the way it's done. When you tell a story you treat it as you would a person." Gilfillan treats his stories gently, and never gives the reader more than is necessary. By means of that economy, he manages to evoke the uniqueness of the Great Plains, and the manner in which human drama there folds back, sooner or later, into that enduring landscape. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Internet Book Watch

Grasshopper Falls is an impressive collection of Merrill Gilfillan's short stories and serves admirable to further document his literary talents. The stories include: Uncle and Shrike; Tailwind; Men in Shadow; Pie for Breakfast; Northbound Bus; Cold Hands, High Water; A Missouri Story; Spanish for Vanish; An Oklahoma Story; Bunker with Pines; Faery Tale for a Large Child; Talk Across Water; Echofield; One Summer by the River; and the title piece, Grasshopper Falls.
—Internet Book Watch

Kirkus Reviews

paper: 1-882413-68-7 From poet and storywriter Gilfillan (Sworn Before Cranes, 1994), more story-sketches—or sketch-stories—with tone, texture, and detail that keep them invariably interesting and humane. A young boy's uncle "has" him for the summer ("Uncle and Shrike") and takes the boy on a car trip from Wyoming toward Indiana and Ohio, where the uncle's ancestors are buried. The two don't make it that far, but little matter; they stay in camps while the uncle reads Thomas Wolfe and John Ruskin—and gravely worries this good-hearted boy by edging closer and closer to senility. Gilfillan's pieces may have no "endings" as such, but they can hit pay dirt with "non-ending-endings," as in the title story, when, after the discovery of a nameless old man, a boy of 15 thinks back in a gorgeously symbolic moment to his grandfather, a famous bronco hand before WWI. Like other pieces, "Men in Shadow" (old Montana men sit in a perfect shady spot through a summer day) allows Gilfillan to show his considerable gift as a raconteur, seamlessly wrapping together tales of a present-day (1988) small town, of WWII, and of 1928—when a man killed another to protect his wife's dignity. Time after time in these 15 stories Gilfillan offers snippets of life in Montana or the Dakotas that are as homemade and unpretentious as, say, Garrison Keillor's people are in his sketches—though Gilfillan's work steers masterfully clear of the sugary traces that can muddle Keillor's. All pieces don't work equally well—satires of outsiders, for example, like "Cold Hands, High Water," or thefaintlytendentious "A Missouri Story," about brutality toward honest hobos around 1902. But far the most are steady-eyed, fine, and always interesting, from "Pie for Breakfast" on through the wonderfully seriocomic "One Summer by the River." "Regionalism" that shows what honest, true writing is—and what it can do.