Islands, Women, and God

by Paul Ruffin

Book Overview

Islands, Women, and God is a collection of stories of sacrifice and courage set in the South. The stories are populated with incredibly authentic universal characters who rise out of their regional... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965135985
• ISBN13: 9780965135986
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Browder Springs Pub
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Fine stories of men's world

Fine stories of men's worldBy ERIC MILES WILLIAMSONISLANDS, WOMEN, AND GOD. By Paul Ruffin. Browder Springs, $24.95 hardcover, $16.95 paperback. PAUL Ruffin, poet, short-story writer and professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, writes about Texas and the Gulf Coast so well that his new story collection is likely to define the literary territory for many years to come. The 17 stories in the collection are about common people, folks from Texas and Mississippi who live quiet and humble lives -- factory workers, farmers, fishermen, husbands and wives and youngsters and oldsters. Although the characters are common people, the book is not. These stories are masterful, every line honed and tight and true, the sentences spoken by the characters in phrases we've often before heard but never before seen on the page. Ruffin's work has been compared with that of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, but his stories are not derivative. Rather, they're part of the new wave of Southern fiction generally and Texas fiction specifically, a wave that includes Southerners such as Barry Hannah, Padgett Powell, Chris Offutt and Charlie Smith, and Texas writers such as Glenn Blake and Tracy Daugherty. Not insignificantly, Ruffin occasionally pays tribute to Cormac McCarthy, a Southerner-turned-Texan like Ruffin himself. Islands, Women, and God is a man's book about the world of men. The stories center on the conflicts inherent in the stifled, brutal and often senseless world of masculinity. Manhunt, the opening story, is about the apprehension of an escaped convict. The hunters of the convict are local men who normally spend their days selling cars and working for insurance companies, these otherwise calm men turned into bloodthirsty bigots and would-be killers, the manhunt a legal excuse to do what they would be doing were there not the constructs of "civil" society. Underpinning our culture is a violence that needs very little to turn supposedly peaceful family men into primordial beasts, Ruffin seems to say. In Tattered Coat Upon a Stick, Ruffin writes of an aging man who, rather than live out his days in senility and helplessness, emasculated, chooses to return to the family property in the country and end his life properly and with dignity. His end is far from morbid or maudlin, but instead glorious and beautiful. Interloper relates the tale of a family man who discovers a burglar in his house and takes care of him. Just before the protagonist of the story meets the burglar, Ruffin writes, No, it is nothing that would warrant calling the police or awakening your wife, nothing to justify wrenching off a table leg and swinging it wildly through the dark. But it is more than simply nothing. So you must summon whatever resolve you are capable of and go down the stairs into the cold darkness of what a few hours earlier was your warm and well-lit den. You are in charge -- it is your house, your domain, and while your wife and children sleep you must

Islands, Women, and God

Islands, Women, and God, Stories by Paul Ruffin. Browder Springs Press, 2001. 237 pp. These seventeen stories play themselves out in the Deep South, East Texas, and West Texas, three areas as dissimilar--in geography, social mores, and philosophy--as, say, Iceland, Bolivia, and Ethiopia. And while Paul Ruffin does employ his considerable skill to give vivid descriptions of these places, his poet's eye and voice and heart focuses tighter and truer on his characters, who, as credible characters must be, are spit-polished mirrors of people everywhere. And what a parade of individuals he sends forth. There's Sam, who undertakes, with a tunnel vision worthy of Ahab, to capture an enormous manta ray in "Devilfish". And Mitchell, in "Tattered Coat Upon a Stick", who wants nothing more than to have his ashes scattered among the mesquite bushes and rocks of the place where he grew up, rather than end up planted in the upscale, manicured cemetery that his children insist upon. And Loretta, perhaps the most haunting of the bunch, who uses the only tool at her disposal to save her husband in "Peaches." Loretta, who is black, has to make her unique sacrifice in the unrelenting era of racial inequality. A young insurance salesman, in "Manhunt", must make his among kudzu-draped backwoods. In "The Interloper", a husband and father must seek out something in the dark rather than lose his family to it, and characters in two of the tales choose to face their final darkness on their own terms. Sacrifice and reconciliation abound. Several of the stories chip away at the old, hard strata of established society in their various settings, and prejudice and cruelty and pomposity are served up in equal measure with love and trust and devotion. In "Corn Silver", a haughty graduate student is duped by an ignorant boy; in "The Sign," a middle aged man whose greatest accomplishment was to move permanently away from his harsh, Mississippi delta upbringing must go back to finally confront it. They were his people only in biological fact. From the eldest to the ones in diapers, they were an illiterate lot, mostly day laborers, fundamentalist in their worship and ultra-conservative in whatever politics they followed. If evolution had had a hand in improving the line over the decades, he could not imagine what they must have been like a century before - he doubted that the generations had witnessed much more than a gradual separation of forehead from cheekbones and thinning of hair from the backs and shoulders of the males. And on and on, in trailer parks, at fishing holes, on wide front porches of bourbon swilling lawyers, the themes of facing death, and, perhaps more importantly, facing life, weave their way through. And it is refreshing to read a writer who chooses not to veil his work in deep symbolism and puzzling time shifts. Every offering in Islands, Women, and God is told carefully and beautifully and forthrightly. Like the works of O'Conner and Welty, they don't have be

Review of Islands, Women, and God

A REVIEW OF PAUL RUFFIN'S ISLANDS, WOMEN, AND GOD Periodically a writer comes along whose flashlight shines a little brighter, probes a little deeper and more discerningly into that cave we call life, with the result that now and then we get a glimpse of something we never saw before. Such an author is Paul Ruffin, whose Islands, Women, and God (Browder Springs Press, 2001) gives us that whiff of something we find in unusual relationships. Already a well-known wri ter of short fiction, a poet, and a novelist, Ruffin in this work turns up the blower, as well as the acuity . Certain of his insights are breathtaking, as in the story "Peaches," wherein a black woman, in order to save her husband from a baseless and trumped-up charge, completely disarms his accuser through seduction. Or as in the small story "Interloper"--which I am ready to call the best of the seventeen stories (and world-class fiction in its own right)--a passive but dutiful and intelligent husband and father rises to the occasion in the middle of the night to save his family from a stranger in their midst and in their home, whose motives are unknown but unreliable, therefore treacherous. "You are in charge here--it is your house, your domain, and while your wife and children sleep you must stand watch if there is a threat," Ruffin says. "This is the law. A very old one." The point here is that in our progressive society now we denigrate aggression, which is probably a good idea; but in such we neglect to foster and nurture aggressive capability in the thinking individual. And aggression?always a function of frustration?and aggressive capability, which can be a savior at a moment's notice, are completely different things. And we do not know this, because we use the same word for both, and tag it pejorative. In Islands, Women, and God Ruffin draws such distinctions, time and time again. The book is in two parts, the first containing random insights: the best description of the kudzu vine you will ever read; hog-killing time down South, a la Faulkner; Revelations' sign of the devil, superbly rendered; how you fee when you are out in a small boat in the Gulf and you float over a ray that is twenty feet across and quite realistically can be seen on both sides of the boat at the same time . . . . The writing is sharp, comprehensive, and heady; the dialogue tuned to perfect pitch. And perhaps the most important lagniappe in Islands, Women, and God is Ruffin's treatment of women. He is gracious, liberating, and understanding in this, but he also has a passion for the psychology underlying the man-woman relationship. Homo Sapiens is not really the rational animal we sometimes think he is, Ruffin seems to be saying, and thus when we gloss over what is really going on beneath the surface in people's lives, we invite trouble. Even chaos. It is a supreme irony that Southern Methodist University Press turned down this collection after the great and widespread success of his first collection pub

Review of Paul Ruffin's Islands, Women, and God

Islands, Women, and God. By Paul Ruffin. In Islands, Women, and God, Paul Ruffin returns to the Alabama, Mississippi and Texas regions he rendered so memorable in his 1993 critically acclaimed short story collection The Man Who Would Be God. They are tales of passion, suspense, violence, racial injustice, renewal, and the inexorable human quest for meaning and identity, laced with flashes of humor. Ruffin's ear for dialogue is impeccable, and his narratives are ripped, pulsing and breathing, from the unmistakable fabric of reality. The author wastes no time engaging the reader's attention. On page one of "Manhunt," the first story of section I, in searing prose pungent as the smell of burning flesh, Ruffin drops his reader deep into the pit of human violence. "The Pond" features Gerald Roper, an aging man who trespasses across Mr. Earl Palmer's pasture to fish in an artesian-fed fishpond. During his fishing expedition, Roper snags a great white thing rolling "like a dumpling in oil as the hook pulled loose and the bobber whistled past his head and clattered onto the gravel behind him, and two eyeless sockets in a white face, cradled by trembling reeds, looked right past him toward the ghostly moon." Next the reader finds Roper questioned by a deputy to whom he has gone to confess his shocking finding. Though the deputy, after viewing the "catch" and recognizing what it is, tries to convince Roper he's hooked a pig, Roper adamantly insists that what he snagged was the bloated body of his former mistress. Among the male protagonists of the other stories in section I are Mr. Turner of "Tattered Coat Upon a Stick," who, terminally ill, returns to his beloved Texas hill country to face his own death; Johnny of "The Sign," who, brutally physically abused during his childhood by his father, returns to his home after a lengthy absence and exacts his sweet revenge; the two graduate students of "Corn-Silver" who are hilariously duped by an illiterate, white-trash kid; and Buddy of "The Dog," a tragic figure who, in saving a dog caught up in a trotline, has his nose bitten off by the very beast whose life he saves, only to end up so monstrous in appearance he's abandoned even by his wife and kids, assuming a huge and dark presence "like some kind of old imagined or remembered sin." "The Dog," tragic though it is, is balanced with a moment of hilarity characteristic of Ruffin's brilliant humor. In section II, "woman" takes center stage: woman as "Nature," the mirror of mortality, the instrument of renewal, and seducer. Ruffin bares the hearts and minds of his female characters with a dispassionate clarity reminiscent of the late Eudora Welty. In "Peaches," one of the most sensual stories in the collection, a white woman misinterprets the remark of a black man who tells her that she has "nice peaches." She and her husband, Murle, are peach orchard keepers, and sell peaches in cardboard boxes by the road. Having packed his pistol and journeyed deep into the wo