Body Parts

by Jere Hoar

Book Overview

Compressing eleven such boisterous works between two covers produces a resounding impact. Described by one reader as a collection of "little disturbances," Body Parts brings together Jere Hoar's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578060192
• ISBN13: 9781578060191
• Release Date: November 1997
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Not a word wasted

A collection out of the Deep South, Jere Hoar's BODY PARTS straddles a range that would give most writers hamstring tears. Impressive as that stretch is, it makes it difficult to describe the collection as a whole. Some of the stories swerve toward fable and the prose strikes with the swift, haphazard accuracy of lightning ("Dark Heart," "The Snopes Who Saved Huckaby," "The Incredible Little Louisiana Chicken Killer"). Others seem composed of the hard, straight lines of a woodcut ("My Father's Voice, Lifting," "Tell Me It Hasn't Come to This") while still others inhabit a hazy indefinable zone somewhere between the fabulous and the reaslistic ("A Brave Damn-Near Perfect Thing," "Body Parts--A Memory of 1944"). What is true throughout is that one would be hard-pressed to find a disposable sentence or even a wasted word. This is not to say we're dealing with some wizard of minimalism--hardly. What I mean is that the sentences are lovely enough, in and of themselves, to keep you reading. Hoar as a gift for the short, sweet simile, as when a "voice soared like a leaf in an updraft." Of a man's roving gaze he writes, "These eyes is like having twin boys in a candy store, and no big sister to hold they hands." Or again, "Brother Wevel gave her a rammish look and she flinched like a well-broke mule hearing the whispered intention of whip." There are so many of these lines in every story one wonders if Hoar has any saved up for another book. Also fairly omnipresent in the collection is a sense of humor that is something akin to a mustache that unexpectedly falls off during a serious conversation--it might not have bumped you past a smile into laughter if only you'd seen it coming. Some of the stories, in fact, are howlingly funny. In particular, "The Snopes Who Saved Huckaby," the story of a preacher who, desperate for a job, finds himself teaching in a girl's finishing school. Brother Wevel knows full well he does not belong among a bevy of girls blooming into womanhood: "[God] sets meat before us we can't pass up, then punishes us without mercy if we eat." And sure enough, Brother Wevel invites trouble aplenty. Unlike the average short story collection, which has one or two ringers among seven or eight shimmerless pieces that are mainly filler, there simply are no clunkers in the 11 tales hoarded bewteeen the covers of BODY PARTS. It's no accident this one was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1998 and no true fan of the short story should be without it.

A fascinating, sexy, and witty book. Terrific fun!

This collection of eleven stories is Jere Hoar's showcase of award winners. All laurels are well deserved by this author. "The Snopes Who Saved Huckaby" was selected by Allan Gurganus as co-winner of the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Prize for Fiction. That story, in a manuscript with its complement, "How Wevel Went," was chosen by Earnest J. Gaines winner of the Deep South Writing Conference Competition. And with most of the stories in Body Parts included in Hoar's manuscript that was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award, well, it's not difficult to understand the trend. Hoar's fiction captures what's best in the tradition of Southern humor ranging from the raucous and violent satires and raunchy tall tales of the Old Southwest to the documentaries of time and place in his sexual coming of age stories to the myth-weaving magical realism and eclectic style peculiar to selections in the second half of the volume like "Half Ass" and "Dark Heart." Like the two faces of a coin, the two parts of the collection are disparate in tone and personality. Part one contains five stories, including the title story "Body Parts:A Memory of 1944," a post-war narrative of adolescent discovery in which the narrator struggles with understanding change in a changing world, the mysteries of women, the unexplored territory of his sexuality, and the amputation of one of his arms after being caught in the gears of the printing press where he works. Part two is composed of six stories which are more eclectic, eccentric, and if possible, more sophisticated than those of part one. The stories of the second half of the collection are sandwiched between "The Snopes Who Saved Huckaby" and "How Wevel Went." Yet, even in stories from the first part of the collection like "Body Parts:A Memory of 1944" or ones less graphic about the fascination like "Tell Me It Hasn't Come to This" or "My Father's Voice, Lifting," it would be a misrepresentation to avoid what seems to be lurking close to the heart of these stories: a smouldering sexual tension which erupts in the hysterical antics of fornicating preachers like Brother Wevel Snopes, who is struck by lightening while in the coital embrace of a 15-year-old school girl, and A.P. Gooch, who calls his penis "the wonder," a tension which surfaces again in the plagues and plights of a May-December marriage in "The Incredible Little Louisiana Chicken Killer" and in the sexual quests of adolescent boys who wish that "the Boy Scout Handbook gave instructions about how to use rubbers" and who struggle to hide erections while ogling bikini-clad girls at the public swimming pool. In stories like "The Last Feminine Woman in the World," sexual fascination is not subtle or coincidental, but it defines the obsession of a former cafeteria worker who murders and preserves his ex-lover in a freezer and grinds her boyfriend up like hamburger to feed to the human scavengers at a dump site. Body P