The Voice of America: Stories

by Rick DeMarinis

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393029670
• ISBN13: 9780393029673
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic

Hard book to review, just read it! One of the best I've read, a Texan's Updike? No, better than Updike. His down and out characters are so real that I wonder if he didn't take case histories!

An unexpected pleasure, well-written and sharply observed

About a third of the these stories are set in the late forties (the first begins on VJ Day 1945) and fifties, while the rest are contemporary. Each Voice of America is male, often middle-aged, often eccentric, dystfunctional or, in a couple of cases, downright creepy. They generally exist at the margins of what passes for the American dream, a world of trailer parks, door to door salespeople, and road wanderers. DeMarinis is certainly not in the business of either transformation or redemption for these people and places. Still, through his eye for telling detail -- one character dreams of "places so familiar and yet so utterly lost that he would wake up with tears on his face, even though the places he dreamed about were nowhere he'd ever been" -- and true talk dialogue, more often than not these stories break through irony and malaise to hope. Among the best: "Paraiso: An Elegy," "Wilderness," the strange encounter of "Infidelity," and "The Voice of America." But my personal favorite is "Her Alabaster Skin," in which a romance novelist writing under the pseudonym Veronica Lamonica meets the woman hired to be Veronica at book store signings. All in all, an excellent read.