The verbs in this thing! The magnificent and effortless similes! My god! Congratulations, Ron Hansen--with Nebraska, you've earned your place among my favorite short story writers, alongside Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and Jim Shepard."Wickedness" comes blazing out of the gate, a swirling (no pun intended) retelling of the blizzard of 1888, and probably the most memorable story in the collection. One such example of those verbs and similes, all wrapped up in a single, breathtaking sentence: "Emily wept, but her tears froze as cold as cold penny nails and her upper lip seemed candlewaxed by her nose and she couldn't stop herself from feeling the difference in the body on top of her."But "Wickedness" isn't all there is to love here. Despite a few missteps (the uninspired "Red-Letter Days" doesn't seem to go much of anywhere, and "The Killers" is notable only for its ambition), everything Hansen is doing here is pretty much outstanding. The range, too, is worth remarking--most people throw around Jim Shepard's name when talking about the heterogeneity of a short story collection, but Hansen's name is certainly worth mentioning, too. He moves from quasi-horror ("Sleepless"), to experimental stream-of-consciousness dreamscapes ("The Boogeyman"), to more traditional literary short fiction ("Can I Just Sit Here for a While?"). And he handles all of them with equal aplomb, his voice still unmistakable among each, the common thread that holds all of this together.The collection's title story ends the book, and is probably the story that shares the most similarities with "Wickedness." As such, it's phenomenal. One such line, also worth quoting here: "High school girls in skin-tight jeans stay in one place on weekends, and jacked-up cars cruise past, rowdy farmboys overlapping inside, pulling over now and then in order to give the girls cigarettes and sips of pop and grief about their lipstick." There are lines like this littered throughout the collection, economical little things that give a defined sense of time and place. They are imbued with history as well as humanity, and all filtered through that unbelievably gifted and detailed voice.Marvelous, marvelous.
My cousin challenged me to read this book. She said she needed explanations for almost every story. I am sitting with her on that bench. A couple of them "I got". Several left me with me scratching my head. I need someone else to read it so we can discuss. I am willing to read the stories again because I really want to "get them". Hansen's stories definitely have a Stephen King quality. They were not what I was expecting at all. Definitely revealing monsters in his stories.I feel like I should have rated this collections of short stories 4 stars, but since I am not sure what some of the stories mean, I am leaving it at 3 for now. Hansen is a good writer. Maybe too good for me.Wickedness: About the 1888 blizzard in Nebraska. This one I understood.Playland: Still scratching my head.The Killers: This is also one I understood.His Dog: I thought I got it, and then when I finished it, I realized I missed something.The Sun so Hot I Froze to Death: I got nothing.Can I Just Sit Here for Awhile: I think I understood this one.The Boogeyman: Heart of Darkness part II?True Romance: NopeSleepless: Maybe a little.Red Letter Days: SortaNebraska: Yes!
