A Quick Kiss of Redemption and Other Stories: & Other Stories

by David Means

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688094597
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

They don't live happily ever after

The stories have a common theme of a relationship based on sex that breaks up. In one a marriage ends. In two or three of them men have brief homosexual affairs. Some are set in a mid-west childhood. Some describe a family with a psychotic daughter but I don't think they'd be useful to a family with such a daughter and I suspect the author would disdain fiction with a helpful purpose. The mentally ill do not get cured. Their eyes become "glassy with lithium" (no such side-effect of lithium I've ever come across but "realism" in literature often means the literary effect of realism rather than real realism). They are elegantly written. I suppose the style is minimalist or dirty realism, at least I thought of Raymond Carver. Mundane events and shabby surrounding are described in careful detail. The only one with real sense of comedy is "A Quick Kiss of Redemption" where teenagers explore a hiden passage in a church when they should be in Sunday school and find themselves looking down at the congregation as service starts and make out above the worshippers. Even that one ends on a pessimistic note. The stories often end in those profound short-story-ending sentences that are supposed to tell us something meaningful about life such as "There will be plenty of things I don't understand, things that I will do and regret long after they're over, things that will take a long time to forgive" which remind me of the profound wisdom of the ancient Bulgarian proverb "no leg is too short to reach the ground." So why five stars? They're good. They are very, very good.

They don't live happily ever after

The stories have a common theme of a relationship based on sex that breaks up. In one a marriage ends. In two or three of them men have brief homosexual affairs. Some are set in a mid-west childhood. Some describe a family with a psychotic daughter but I don't think they'd be useful to a family with such a daughter and I suspect the author would disdain fiction with a helpful purpose. The mentally ill do not get cured. Their eyes become "glassy with lithium" (no such side-effect of lithium I've ever come across but "realism" in literature often means the literary effect of realism rather than real realism). They are elegantly written. I suppose the style is minimalist or dirty realism, at least I thought of Raymond Carver. Mundane events and shabby surrounding are described in careful detail. The only one with real sense of comedy is "A Quick Kiss of Redemption" where teenagers explore a hidden passage in a church when they should be in Sunday school and find themselves looking down at the congregation as service starts and make out above the worshippers. Even that one ends on a pessimistic note. The stories often end in those profound short-story-ending sentences that are supposed to tell us something meaningful about life such as "There will be plenty of things I don't understand, things that I will do and regret long after they're over, things that will take a long time to forgive" which remind me of the deep wisdom of the ancient Bulgarian proverb "no leg is too short to reach the ground." So why five stars? They're good. They are very, very good.

More Respect in Retrospect

After being deeply impressed with Means' ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS I needed more. This book is out of print, having met with lukewarm reviews when it was published in 1991. Well, there ARE copies available and I would urge any reader who treasures the art of short stories to find a copy. All of the seeds of the brilliant new book (Assorted Fire Events) were planted in A QUICK KISS... - it just took some time for the seeds to grow into the significant product now before us. Means is an enormously gifted author, a fertile mind with imaginative flights of fancy that push the envelope of bizzare and nihilism, a writer who can find in the most unlikely characters reasons for uncovering universal truths and universal fears. Most of these stories seem like childhood remembrances of life in the midwest, but I doubt any are autobiographical in that they are packed with unusually strange characters. Means delves into adolescent struggles with coming of age, the shock of discovering family secrets, observance of paranormal events, and every time he comes up with a unique story that while it completely informs us, it also trails off in the end like an invitation to follow the author to the next strange happening. I think this David Means is a brilliant mind and I hope he will consider gifting us with a full fledged long novel. But for now, he sits with the royalty of gifted short story writers - from any time in history. I can't recommend this Means higly enough!

An excellent first collection of stories

Many of these stories took me by surprise and I delighted in the tone and style of Mean's writing.