Word: peck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hands of a less skillful writer, this complicated premise might have come off as writing-seminar pretense. But Peck has the talent and energy to flesh out his idea beautifully. Martin and John displays a keen eye for details and striking imagery: a drunken mother ensconced in a dark room "looked like an ice cube in rum;" on the open prairie "the sky gap(es) like an open mouth." Peck's language renders, "My face felt swollen and shapeless, like a moldy orange, as though grief had been shoved into my mouth like a handful of seeds, but I didn...
These insights sustain even the weaker sections of the book; some of the New York stories aren't as well thought out as others. But Peck usually displays a full command of the different tones he employs. The short story format allows him to try on narrative voices that range from the biting to the lyrical, and he achieves effects that recall such very different writers as Raymond Carver and Willa Cather...
...book progresses and the narrative gains coherence, the purposes of Peck's structure becomes clearer. The stories express grief by talking around painful, precise facts; it's easier to imagine the way things might have been than to remember exactly the way they were. Is Beatrice John's mother who dies after a miscarriage, as the narrator of "Blue Wet Paint Columns" tells us, or is she his lonely step-mother, as we read in "The Search for Water"? Is Martin a runaway boy who shows up at John's Kansas house one day, or a grade school teacher...
These biographical facts metter less than the truths of character they allow Peck to express. While the characters' occupations and social positions fluctuate, certain gestures and objects of intimacy reverberate through all the stories a hand ruffling hair, a rose in a lapel, a certain turn of phrase. The final effect is like looking at multiple exposures of a photograph, or into a glorious colored kaleidescope. Although Martin and John never tells us the exact details of these characters' lives, it gives a finely observed portrait of the way those lives feel...
...While Peck suggests that stories which mourn death can also sustain life, what makes this novel truly heartbreaking is his understanding of the limits of stories--the stubborn persistence of real life. Peck possess the double ability to spin beautiful fictions and then expose their falsity. As John watches the emaciated Martin die. Peck offers a delicate, gruesome image: "The way his shoulders shook and the way his bones poked at his wet skin made me think of old rice-paper lanterns shaking in the wind, starting to melt in the rain...