Bizarre Bonding

...The tale ends with father punching out Uncle Trash as the boys look on and mother heads off again...

...In the jokey and ultimately insubstantial "Happiness of the Garden Variety," the repetition of names of colors, places, people, and things numbs us to what we should be caring about...

...Here Richard is at his most lush and metaphoric...

...Richard's stories are filled with characters held together, like the railroad cars, by "worn fraternal grips...

...Yet Richard carries us smoothly here, the voice smart and self-deprecating enough to pull off some of the funnier moments in recent American fiction, plus much clever wordplay...

...The story ends here, in the air, briefcase handcuffed to housepainter's wrist...

...There is a little bit of Moses in Fishboy, and the resonance of a Classical metamorphosis...

...The plot has as many bumps and dips as the airplane (in which "nothing works exactly") that the two protagonists get around in...

...He has just put himself out of work by burning down the motel he has been painting to help a friend pay back a debt to a big-money drug dealer...

...The lake in the story is described as " an hour across and a minute deep, with, in its middle, aspeckofheavenfallen so heavily it sent a wave against the tide, the metal in its middle drawing steel and iron so a spoon set on a table slides of f across the floor and swims a spooning swim through the peat-soaked water down to what draws it...

...His care for them over the months the parents are away consists of a steak-and-Champale dinner and not much more...

...Fishboy" is about another kind of castoff, a kidnapped and then abandoned child who lives in a cardboard box and survives on the leavings of the local fishing industry...

...Beneath my brother and my's room we hear them coughing and growling, scratching their ratted backs against the boards beneath our beds...

...The narrator describes in comic detail what happens when the two men steer their airplane down to buzz a coal train: "I obediently take the wheel at powerline lever while Charles unbuckles his pants and presses his pimpled rear-end against his side of the canopy glass...

...There were never any symptoms of aviation in his family...

...The brothers in "Strays" do eventually catch one of the dogs, but not before their mother "pulls all the preserves off the shelves onto the floor, sticks my brother and my's Easter Sunday drawings in her mouth, and leaves the house through the field next door cleared the week before for corn...

...Mark Richard's prose, dense with the stuff of the lives he describes, duplicates their joy and their defiance...

...The speaker in "The Theory of Man" is a "frustrated portrait artist trapped in a world of low-bid trim and latex," that is, a housepainter...

...While the author most often takes us seemingly without effort into the world of strays and outcasts, at times his exertion begins to show...

...He knows it is due to the uncle's neglect...

...Richard is capable, however, of covering a lot of ground in a few sentences, and he is excellent at moving us ever deeper into his characters' poverty-ridden lives...

...The father soon follows her, leaving behind Uncle Trash to watch out for his sons...

...Salute and Topboy are high on the list...

...In return, he gains for atime an interest in the friend's shady, exciting life, as well as a share in his girlfriend...

...We lie awake, listening, my brother thinking of names to name the one he is setting out to catch...

...The final image is of the men looking do wn at another coal train: "Over our shoulders we turn to watch the train before we wing homeward, load after load of the earth's dead heart mined into shiny black pieces, the car couplings clasped in worn fraternal grips...

...The father returns one day, mother in tow, only to find his house burned down...

...His greatest successes come when an incident unfolds in the midst of the narrators' memories and associations, leaving us with the feeling that we have not only been told a tale but shown a universe both vast and specific...

...There is something indisputably American about all this male bonding—and happily in this collection what is American is neither sentimental nor self-righteous...

...It goes to this, " the housepainter informs usinmid-flight...

...Genius," about a fat man who can't get over the woman who has cast him off, though he has no shortage of replacements, is a wacked-out formalist exercise, the events related in short sections like steps in an instruction manual (there is even a list of things the woman has thrown at Genius, including a sneaker and a raisin box...

...His sentences are rich in carefree assonances and alliterations, and punctuated by unruly contortions and inversions of conventional syntax...

...Charles has everything between his legs squeezed behind him, presenting the engineer with what Charles calls a Flying Fruit Salad.' The two land at a mountaintop estate to pick up a briefcase whose delivery, they assume, will finally settle Charles' drug debt...

...The story is funny and sad and written with such assurance—the fleeing mother is "a flatfooted running rustle through the com" —that you hardly realize how skillfully it has been put together...

...Here, for example, is the opening of "Strays": "At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes...

...The story is full of rousing bawdiness...

...contributor, "Massachusetts Review, " "Story Quarterly" The characters in these stories are poor, homeless, out of work, insane— sometimes all at once—yet entirely without self-pity...

...The title story, similarly, is too cluttered with incidents for us to keep the plot straight...

...we are left with little opportunity to determine how the narrative links up with its violent end...

...He's making myth here...

...The uncle is a gambler and drinker who is not above taking just about everything the boys owninagameofOldMaid...

...Other tales in this collection are equally well built...

...Only after takeoff do they fear the briefcase might contain a bomb...

...I have known Charles all his life...