Geoffrey Becker (1)

I really enjoyed Geoffrey Becker's novels - Hot Springs and Bluestown - so I was looking forward to this collection, particularly after having read a couple of the stories that appear here in literary magazines ("Another Coyote Story" in Crazyhorse and "Black Days" in the New England Review.) Becker has a great, straightforward style. The stories don't always have an overly dramatic or plot driven beginning, middle & end, just as often they're slice of life vignettes that offer insight into what makes a particular person tick. And often the writing just takes off, as it does in this passage from "A Naked Man" when the character ruminates on the unborn baby (which he calls "Frick") in his wife's belly, which got its start from an artificial insemination from a man he imagines is named "Brad":

"And now, Brad has begot Frick, who had somehow managed to grab onto my wife's uterine wall and ontologically recapitulate phylogeny, moving from tadpole to fish to alien space-being (we'd seen him at the twenty-week ultrasound in all his Kubrick-esque weirdness, bigheaded and dreaming of world domination), to the restless waiting child who liked to practice Tae Bo in my wife's stomach while she tried to paint."

On the basis of the subject matter, one could easily assume Becker is a frustrated musician. Many of the stories feature men who love music and the guitar, but have to deal with the limitations of their not-so-great talent.

The 12 stories in the collection are:

1. Black Elvis - 12 pp - An elderly man, who looks every bit the part of a Delta bluesman, prefers to play Elvis songs at a ribs and blues joint every week during the open mic night. While he has been a legend in his own mind as "Black Elvis," he has to wonder if he has any talent at all when a young Korean with the name "Robert Johnson" takes the stage one night and blows the crowd away with his renditions of blues classics.

2. Know Your Saints - 15 pp - After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Larry moves to Florence to live with his aunt, a performance artist, and poses as an art history graduate student to give tours of the local attractions. One of the tourist clients may or may not experience stigmata when viewing a fresco of St. Francis having his own stigmata when eying the Coronation of the Virgin.

3. Cowboy Honeymoon - 17 pp - A teacher leaves Baltimore after a co-worker suddenly dies and travels cross country to visit his sister who runs a hotel in the Southwest. There he hooks up with a woman who pretended to be on a "cowboy honeymoon" to get a better room at the hotel for herself and a boyfriend she's not too happy with.

4. This Is Not a Bar - 13 pp - A guy with a lot of failures in his life - 3 marriages, a job as an unqualified preparer of tax returns, and a sometimes girlfriend - hooks up with a younger version of himself and tries to impart some wisdom.

5. Iowa Winter - 18 pp - After his son dies of AIDS, a man is asked by his ex-wife to tell the son's boyfriend to move out of her house, where the son had come to die. The son's partner is sick too, and the father, an alcoholic living on disability, tries to befriend him after he lets the young man come live with him.

6. Imaginary Tuscon - 12 pp - Two untenured college professors at different schools navigate the challenges of their job searches and long-distance relationship.

7. Man Under - 14 pp - A rambling tale of the misadventures of two college grads struggling as musicians in Brooklyn. Their landlord lets them play loud music in their apartment, hoping they'll drive out the elderly man in a rent-controlled apartment beneath them, but all their equipment gets stolen when the landlord removes the security door to their building.

8. Another Coyote Story - 11 pp - A guy dies in a skiing accident and then his afterlife consists of filling in for author Sherman Alexie on a book tour. The story features a unique structure that switches back and forth between the present of his afterlife and the moments - told backwards from end to beginning - that led up to his death.

9. Jimi Hendrix, Bluegrass Star - 17 pp - A young American man and woman connect as street musicians in Europe. At first the guy only knows four songs (and a killer Hendrix, playing the guitar with his teeth, impersonation). The woman, though, is a talented bluegrass musician. Any attempt at romance is hindered by her engagement to another man at home, but he manages to get some sympathy from her by pretending to be dying of cancer.

10. Santorini - 15 pp - A great story about a woman's bad choices after a lifetime of failed relationships. On vacation in Greece with her best friend and the friend's college-aged son, she doesn't resist when the son comes on to her and then compounds the mistake by telling her friend about it.

11. The Naked Man - 13 pp - An interesting portrait of all the mixed feelings a man has during his wife's pregnancy, which got its start from an artificial insemination. Interestingly, his wife is a painter and for her gallery opening, the main painting featured, "The Naked Man," is a nude which has his face, but an ex-boyfriend's body - and imaginatively enlarged groin. His manhood is substituted for everywhere.

12. Black Days - 16 pp - A professor who's also an amateur musician travels with the lead singer of his band to play a concert in Italy, but the concert was cancelled long before they arrived, and they're left with nothing to do but play out the bitter end of their romantic relationship.
… (més)

Five years after giving up her daughter for adoption, Bernice is determined to reclaim the girl from David and Tessa, the conservative Christian couple who became her parents. However, as she rushes headlong into action without a plan, she not only finds herself unprepared for parenthood, but bewildered that no one comes to her defense. As Bernice flees Colorado for her native Baltimore, their daughter's kidnapping exposes the deep flaws in David and Tessa's marriage, especially as a woman named Robin exposes David's many secrets and flaws ... none of which fit with his professed faith.

While the story sounds promising, the delivery is not. Geoffrey Becker delivers an uneven tale with little plot and no real plan, just like Bernice. Not even Emily, the little girl ostensibly at the heart of the action, is interesting. Many of the characters -- especially the adoptive father, David -- are dusty stereotypes and never emerge as real people. Even what are supposed to be revelations, such as the identity of man who impregnated Bernice all those years ago, fall flat.

Apparently Mr. Becker is capable of much better work -- his story collection, Black Elvis, won the 2008 Flannery O'Connor Prize for fiction -- but it's not evident in Hot Springs.… (més)