Light in the Crossing: Stories Book

Cloten, Minnesota, just might be Kent Meyers's Yoknapatawpha--his literary home ground and the center of an entire imagined universe. Life in this rural community can be brutally difficult; winters are long, farms teeter on the verge of financial collapse, and violence is never far from the surface. Meyers's debut novel, The River Warren, followed the ugly life and cataclysmic death of Two-Speed Crandall, Cloten's notorious town drunk. Several stories in Light in the Crossing explore the same territory. In "Two-Speed," Crandall's death is retold from yet another point of view, while in "Making the News," a sculptor finds himself obsessed with re-creating the fatal accident. Like a local myth, Two-Speed's life bears repeating again and again, until Cloten's inhabitants can solve the paradox of someone who makes a fine bar story but a less than fine man. Other stories follow two young men playing a dangerous game of chicken, a farmer's wife who has to shoot the family dog, and a man who learns to grieve his wife by struggling to rid his land of a stubborn shelf of rock. Read together, the individual voices in these tales blend into a communal whole--like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, the voice of Cloten by turns passes judgment and forgives. Meyers is a fine writer whose prose is as austere yet as lovely as the Minnesota prairie. But the real achievement here lies in his exploration of the ties that bind Cloten as well as the loneliness that divides it. In taking apart what makes this little town tick, Meyers shows just how complicated the simple life can be. --Chloe ByrneRead More