Big Bend: Stories

Rating:
Summary: The Huge Hearts of Big Bend
Review: I read this wonderful collection of stories with a sense of absolute delight. Bill Roorbach knows the secret desires in the hearts of all his befuddled, passionate men. In "Fog," he enters the world of a boy's first romantic love and makes it surprising and new, erotic and terrifying, thrilling and funny: "Then she wanted to know how it felt and I wanted to know how she felt and we said tingling and bursting, the same for both of us, almost hurtful, and she said, 'Love you.' Which I tried to say, too, but it came out just like the vowel sounds in English class." The remarkable "Taughannock Falls" has the sweep and complexity of a full novel, though it fills only thirteen pages. Two middle-aged men, estranged since one married the other's girlfriend twenty years earlier, re-enter each other's lives under extraordinary circumstances: Stephen has fallen into a mysterious catatonic state, and Bob believes he might be the only one with enough knowledge, love, anger, and desire to pull him out again. "Not a movement from my old friend. Not a blink of the eye, not a nod of the head, not a tear on the cheek, not a tap of the foot, not a twitch of the lip. He looks tremendous--healthy and wise, clean and brave, courteous and kind." When Stephen finally snaps open, he is a bursting boy, delivered not into the present, not into his handsome, forty-five-year-old body--but tossed backward into the life he left in his twenties, into a time when no love surpasses the manic joy he feels with his friend "Bobbo." What amazes me about all the stories in this collection is Bill Roorbach's vision of grace. There's a fast heat on the surface of every tale, a love of language that is playful and exact. The levity, the crisp dialogue, the sharp sting of interior revelation, all serve as counterpoints to quiet explorations of mercy and forgiveness, tenderness and compassion. The title piece is a tour de force that pushes Bill Roorbach's enormous talents as a storyteller to their limits. Dennis Hunter--wealthy, widowed, seventy-four years old and still bound by love to his wife Betty--is an unlikely candidate for a job with the United States Forest Service that pays just above minimum wage. And he's an even more unlikely candidate for a troubling, giddy, unavoidable attachment to a married woman in her forties who watches birds and weighs as much as he does. But Mr. Roorbach is a writer who knows and celebrates love at every age, in every marvelous incarnation. These two will swim the River of Ghosts to make love in Mexico where Martha believes she won't be breaking a parting promise to her husband, a vow "not to mess around with any man in Texas." This isn't an easy moment physically or spritually, and Dennis Hunter, besieged by desire, never lets us forget the moral complexities, the fear, or the wonder. "She was forty-seven and married and standing waist deep and naked in the Rio Grande not twenty feet from Mexico. Dennis felt her gaze . . . and followed Martha, climbed in the river after her . . . he was being swept away in the current, pictured himself washed up on a flat rock dead and naked miles downstream. But Martha got hold of his hand laughing and they stood waist deep together in the stream rushing past, silty, sweetly warm water." This collection is pure pleasure for all the senses, a balm for the spirit, an immersion in a world where passion is the greatest risk and love the only certain path to rapture and redemption.

Rating:
Summary: Great Stories
Review: This is another great book from Bill Roorbach adding to his SUMMERS WITH JULIET and WRITING LIFE STORIES. Roorbach writes with masculine vigor without being macho. His empathy for the elderly equals his concern for normal people with lonely hearts. He is a romantic through and through. After reading BIG BEND, you want to read everything this brilliant and sympathetic author puts out. Read this and watch for more.