Word: pecked
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...then, Peck dismantles this pretty image, exposing the unpretty reality it describes and dignifies: "When his body folded over at the waist...and his face smacked the tub's bottom, I didn't think it was like a rice-paper lantern being closed. I thought it was like the body of a six foot-two-inch man who weighed eighty pounds and who'd had all the shit and blood and water and air sucked out of him folding over in death...
...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...
This intrusion of a messy, brutal reality into the realm of art lends this book its stunning force. To use the words of one character, the story "floats...off the page, defying the cramped letters that frame it, spilling out into life." Few 25-year-olds demonstrate Peck's intimacy with the painful facts of death and loss, and fewer can write about them with this much grace and power. Martin and John gives evidence of a prodigious, promising talent...