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Rating: 
Summary: A Fine Writer's Many Moods
Review: If you ever get a chance to see Mr. Ron Carlson read some of his work don't miss out. He has many moods, but you might catch him in his Arizona version of Mark Twain mood, where word leaps up on word to outdo everything that has gone before, for a a folklorist of the fabulist he has no peer. Then to turn to the tales collected in AT THE JIM BRIDGER is to fall into a trap of melancholy and missed chances that will remind you of a more varied sort of John Cheever. The suburban outlook is unmistakable, but in Carlson it is endearing. One story, "The Potato Gun," is haunting as anything ever written by Andre Dubus, while "The Towel Season" is like something Nabokov might have written had he a household full of kids.
Rating: 
Summary: so-so
Review: It's endearing, as long as you're a white male American who has gone fishing and backpacking at some point in his lifetime. My only problem is in the title short story, the only one I read. The narrator fails to tell us how much of the story he experienced with the other guy he shares with the woman he is passing off to the other guy at this bar/restaurant he's in called the Jim Bridger. The lack of the specific details as to how much she knows distracts from the honesty of the story. We fail to understand how much she knows, a distance from the woman's perception which is pitiful and never restored from the insight we are shown with her psychological realism drawn so clearly in the beginning when she enjoys the beer. I also fail to see how enlightening it is for a woman to be dragged around like a dog on a leash and passed on from one unfortunate midwestern hick to another. The story short changes my American experience with a frontier-type homosocial machismo.
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Summary: Warm, Elegant, Memorable
Review: Reading At the Jim Bridger was like catching up with an old friend. These new stories will sound vaguely familiar, but will inevitably end up surprising you. No matter who you are, you'll not only see yourself in each set of characters, but you'll find yourself rooting for them. A great collection that will serve you well at home, during travel, at the book club. Whatever and wherever you read, just read this.
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Summary: This is a book you should read.
Review: Ron Carlson is perhaps the best short fiction writer in America. He can do something very view authors can do: write a happy story without making it tripe. These stories are funny, moving and true, whether they really happened or not. Pick this up with "The Hotel Eden" and then track down "Plan B for the Middle Class" and "News of the World."
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Summary: Ron Carlson's Done It Again
Review: Start with any of these stories, and you'll soon be hooked. Read "At the Jim Bridger" from the front, from the back, it doesn't matter. Soon you'll be grabbing other Carlson books--"News of the World," "Plan B," "Hotel Eden"--and the next thing you know, you'll have devoured everything he's written the way I have. Nobody cares more about the short story than Ron, and it shows. Stories like "Towel Season," "Ordinary Son" and "Potato Gun" are told by narrators who only get one shot making their stories matter to others, and all they have is heart, humor and voice to get them there. And the title piece is an explication on story telling from the master. You simply won't be able to put this book down. One caution, however: if you read this book in public be prepared for strangers glaring at you because of all your laughing.
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Summary: He knows more about the human heart in conflict with itself
Review: than anybody. "At the Jim Bridger" is Carlson's third book of short stories in a row; each time I didn't think it was possible for him to surpass himself, but somehow he does. His whimsical, funny, sad stories about love and lost and possibility are far truer to me than Carver's stories of dissolution. Carlson has the amazing ability to tell a sweet or happy story without selling out to melodrama or senimentality; he can tell a gut-wrenching story of loss and despair without giving in entirely to cynicism and morbidity. I can't tell you how many friends who tell me "I don't like books of short stories" I've converted to worshippers of Carlson over the years through gifts of "Plan B for the Working Class" and "Hotel Eden"; now I have a new axe to grind, and grind it I will. I can't wait to see his new novel next year.
Rating:
Summary: He knows more about the human heart in conflict with itself
Review: than anybody. "At the Jim Bridger" is Carlson's third book of short stories in a row; each time I didn't think it was possible for him to surpass himself, but somehow he does. His whimsical, funny, sad stories about love and lost and possibility are far truer to me than Carver's stories of dissolution. Carlson has the amazing ability to tell a sweet or happy story without selling out to melodrama or senimentality; he can tell a gut-wrenching story of loss and despair without giving in entirely to cynicism and morbidity. I can't tell you how many friends who tell me "I don't like books of short stories" I've converted to worshippers of Carlson over the years through gifts of "Plan B for the Working Class" and "Hotel Eden"; now I have a new axe to grind, and grind it I will. I can't wait to see his new novel next year.
Rating:
Summary: Decency, hope, integrity, love
Review: There is a decency about the characters in Ron Carlson's short stories that is never sappy, that rings true. And missing is that element so common in so much of today's fiction--smartalecky irony. His people may seem naive, but they also seem real, yearning for completion, meaning in their lives. Ron Carlson is a major short story writer, in the same league as Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.
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