Holding Pattern: Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen

Overview

The world of Jeffery Renard Allen's stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other's resolve.

In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975098
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/02/2008
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of the novel Rails Under My Back and two collections of poetry. Allen was born and raised in Chicago. He teaches creative writing at Queens College/CUNY, and his awards include a Whiting Award.

Editorial Reviews

The prodigiously talented Jeffery Renard Allen is without question one of our most important writers. His novel, Rails Under My Back, kicked ass, and these tough, beautiful stories are a gift. You cannot finish this collection without being dazzled by Allen's manifold talents.” —JUNOT DÍAZ

From the Publisher

Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works-in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are "dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings." In "It Shall Be Again," more of a prose poem than a story, characters open their mouths to catch a "thick dirty" rain of pennies. Some stories lack cohesiveness, and although Allen isn't attempting to write traditional pieces, the stories would benefit from coherency. Even in the weaker entries, though, Allen delivers striking images-two brothers chewing on wads of toilet paper, a scalp that looks like "watermelon meat chewed down to the rind." It is these images, rather than particular events or characters, that leave the strongest impressions. Though scattered cultural references and spot-on dialogue root these stories mainly in the present, they have a distinct feeling of being outside of time. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Chicago native Allen, author of the acclaimed novel Rails Under My Back and a poet and professor of African American literature and creative writing (Queen's Coll., New York), here offers a collection of ten short stories set mostly in inner-city Chicago and the rural South. Allen writes in a somewhat experimental style that favors edgy poetic language and occasional surrealism over conventional plot and a linear story line. Among his mostly angry, violent characters, there is someone named Hatch who appears in several stories, but as a different person each time. These stories don't try to meet us half way; they jolt us like a blast of rap heard from a passing car, and it takes a leap of the imagination to make sense of them. This collection will probably be more at home in a library's African American literature collection than on the shelf with popular fiction.
—Leslie Patterson

Library Journal

The lives of black Americans, shadowed by the surreal and shot through with violence, are the focus in these ten stories from poet and novelist Allen (Rails Under My Back, 2000). Violence erupts in the third sentence of "Same," when Glory Hope Lincoln severs her husband's penis in revenge for his "wandering eye," an act inspired by Jesus, "the only white man she liked." The story is about her son Lincoln Roosevelt Lincoln, who has inherited his father's sex drive and his mother's determination in planning the seduction of a grieving widow; she and her husband had been fans of Lincoln's hugely successful war-porn novels. The story shows Allen's strengths and weaknesses: It's compellingly readable yet wildly undisciplined, with a messy ending. Violence is also the backdrop to Lee Christmas's life in "Shimmy." Back in Mississippi, before Lee moved north and made his fortune, his mother, a devout Christian, murdered his abusive father before killing herself. Up north Lee encounters the paranormal, a ghost making love to his wife. Later, in another messy ending, the hitherto powerful Lee is bested by the psychic power of a seven-year-old midget. In the title story, the power belongs to the white cops who bust a black turnstile-jumper; there's a too-long wait before the sight of a prisoner with wings marks a sharp turn to the surreal, while in the muddled "The Green Apocalypse" the power belongs to a demonic teenager. The other memorable stories are "Bread and the Land" (a child tries to figure out adult duplicity) and "The Near Remote" (police superintendent and unhelpful civilian witness in a power struggle). All these stories are spiced up by terrific dialogue: Allen would make afine playwright. Only in "Mississippi Story" is the dialogue deliberately bland, to contrast with an unresolved racial fury pulsing beneath the surface. A striking talent ill at ease with the short-story form.

Kirkus Reviews