What Salmon Know : Stories

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The depressing, destructive and self-destructive sides of American masculinity are Reed's territory in his first book of short fiction, whose 10 stories range in tone from downbeat pathos to violent, scorched-earth bleakness. While Reid's prose is always crisp and clear, his images striking and memorable, it can be hard to feel for his characters: many come across simply as obnoxious drunks. In the title story, set in Alaska, two sloshed salmon poachers start a fistfight with two equally despicable soldiers over a half-dead and bloodily mutilated fish. "Kill the fucking fish, Marley says. Kill the fish or I'm gonna fillet your fucking ass!" In "Overtime," Drew, a factory foreman, forces a family man to stay late and run the presses, though he had planned to attend his daughter's volleyball game. After the girl is kidnapped and murdered, Drew blames himself. Everyone else blames him, too: he is ostracized, then fired, and slides into unemployment, divorce and alcoholism. "All That Good Stuff" is Reid's misguided attempt at satire: a group of addicts, drunks and depressives form a Man's Forum, and then a dysfunctional softball team, under the tutelage of an incompetent Iron John type. The humane, moving "No Strings Attached" is a welcome departure: its rough-and-ready male protagonist falls in love with a gentle woman and has to deal with her sad, disturbing secrets. As in his well-received novel of college football, If I Don't Six, Reid's upsetting plots and foul-mouthed, minimally self-aware characters place him in a worthy tradition of American fiction, one staked out by Stephen Crane, Hemingway and Raymond Carver. But even readers aware of Reid's lineage might long for a time-out from these stories' scathing action, or accuse him of unnecessary roughness. (Sept.) FYI: Anchor will simultaneously release If I Don't Six in paperback. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Reid's male, working-class characters live on the edges of society, either in half-wild locales, like Alaska, or in marginal jobs in big cities--raw settings that mirror the state of their souls. Hard-edged and often violent, these are characters struggling to survive in difficult economic and social situations. "All the Good Stuff" throws a curve at the standard male-bonding story as a recently divorced man seeks to rebuild his life through a softball team composed of his support group members. "Laura Borealis" is about a directionless Alaskan carpenter who finds a moment of happiness with a traveling exotic dancer. "No Strings Attached" involves a man who becomes enmeshed in the achingly complex emotional world of an ex-lover's friend. At his best, Reid's (If I Don't Six) first story collection successfully travels the emotional and stylistic territory of Raymond Carver or Thom Jones. Recommended for most public libraries.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Tim Wendel

Reid can effectively tell a powerful story, often in an understated way...There's much to admire in Reid's writing. The prose is strong, and the stories are often fast-paced, reminiscent of early Hemingway.

USA Today

Kirkus Reviews

Tough-as-nails stories of blue-collar men running low on chances, luck and hope, by the author of the novel If I Don't Six (not reviewed). In Reid's universe there are two kinds of jobs: bad ones that you can, with difficulty, stomach, and awful ones that you can't. His protagonists—carpenters, machinists, handymen, almost all desperate for work—have only their pride and native wit to sustain them. And that isn't enough. They drink too much, find most women unobtainable, dream of a life spent free of bosses, and know that "salary is the working man's cancer." Maynard (in "Lime"), down on his luck after a disastrous stint on a fishing boat, reluctantly takes on the job of caretaker at a farm owned by wealthy dilettantes. The disposal of the rotting corpse of a horse becomes the focus of a power struggle as his employer attempts to humiliate and break him, and he tries in turn, despairingly, to outwit her. In "Overtime," Drew, a harried supervisor at a printing plant, forces a reluctant worker to put in overtime. When the man's daughter is murdered as a result of his absence, Drew begins drinking, loses his wife and his job—and discovers a world of men like him, "out on the streets, looking for work, slightly out of shape, losing their hair." In the title story, two sardonic construction workers in Alaska ("a postcard from hell") find something worth fighting for when they come across soldiers who are mutilating salmon. The violence that results is liberating; the rootless narrator discovers that he "wants to know what the salmon know when they're blasting upstream to die." Repeatedly here, extremity is the only thing left worth having; several narrators, such as theprotagonist of "Laura Borealis," discover that only at the moment when they're facing violence can they come close to feeling happy, unfettered. Strong, unsettling tales, narrated in a spare, pungent prose; further evidence that writing about the working classes, once a staple of American fiction, isn't extinct yet.