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The crisp, melancholy stories in
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy showcase Ellen Gilchrist's many gifts: her effortless prose, her empathy and emotional depth, her irrepressible optimism. In the title story, 5-year-old Rhoda Manning (a recurring character in Gilchrist's books) is allowed to go hunting with her father armed with a BB gun. The reader waits for the gun to hit the wrong target, but it never does. The story is about a disaster-free afternoon, although in "Entropy"--told from Rhoda's point of view when she is "old and gray"--we realize disasters arrive in many guises. Other stories enter the lives of Arab terrorists, pregnant teenage girls, hairdressers, and high-school football players. Gilchrist makes each character human--even the terrorist, bitten by bugs and dreaming of Allah as he waits in a tree for his target to appear. Throughout the collection, Gilchrist’s voice is soothing and trustworthy, full of hypnotic cadences: "Remorse fell like rain from heaven. The golden rain trees were putting out their leaves."
--Ellen Williams
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From Publishers Weekly
Following up on her critically acclaimed Collected Stories, Gilchrist delivers another satisfying collection. As her loyal readers have come to expect, her sure sense of place, whether New Orleans; Wyoming; San Francisco; or Fayetteville, Ark., provides the backdrop for headstrong, independent narrators. Five of the 10 stories feature the Rhoda Manning of earlier collections; here, she is a woman in her 60s, reflecting on her life and her family, particularly the unshakable influence of her thoroughly masculine father, Big Dudley. As Rhoda relates tales of her youth and the ongoing struggle with her father over the lives of her own sons, who are living the counterculture life of the 1970s, she realizes that she is more like him than she would like to admit. Another well-loved character, Nora Jane Harwood, is featured in "Gotterdammerung," a suspenseful and eerily prescient story of terrorist assassins. New characters levelly and unsparingly investigate the time-honored themes of family and complicated love: the high school couple coping with some difficult life choices in "The Abortion"; a gay hairdresser in "Remorse," who considers what he could have done to prevent the death of his best friend, Sally Sue; and "Alone," featuring 14-year-old Ginny, who is making the best of the departure of her best friend, Sabra. With these new stories, rendered in direct, clear prose, Gilchrist proves again that the people and places she conjures resonate in a wider world.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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