The Middle of Nowhere
Peregrine Smith, 1991
Here is a major collection by a writer of uncommon grace and range. Each story is marked by an indelible sense of place and an irresistible narrative force. In a clear, measured voice, tempered by a tender regard for human weaknesses, Kent Nelson probes beneath the surface of his characters’ everyday lives and reveals the hopes and fears residing at the core of their most significant relationships.
In “The Middle of Nowhere,” a teenage boy living with his father in a remote trailer in Arizona, fends off his father’s girlfriends, except for an Irish woman, Goldie, who’s the catalyst for his escape from his nowhere life. “Learning to Dream, is about a woman who’d never dreamed until she saw a painting of Goya’s; “Yellow Flowers” follows the parents of a boy who, several times, disappears from school; in “Invisible Life,” included in The Best American Short Stories, a husband whose wife, and the mother of his three small children, decides to go back to graduate school, forcing the husband to take over the responsibilities.
Summary
Critical Praise
“This collection contains 13 finely honed tales, many of which have a Southwest locale. Emotions resonate within a mountainous desert setting--a hauntingly beautiful landscape for which Nelson has a nearly mystical affinity; and humans respond to the vulnerability of animals. Nelson's sensitively crafted fiction draws its strength from immersion in the natural scene, its intensity diminishing when he uses other backdrops.”
—Publisher's Weekly
“Kent Nelson shows how place itself can press upon the human nervous system with intolerable weight.”
—Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove
“The beauty of Kent Nelson’s fiction renews my faith in the power of realistic narrative. . . The stories are both lush and precise. . .”
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
Quotes from Books
“I took my daughter’s hand and squeezed it, and she squeezed mine. The bat fluttered over us, a friend who knew the dark. Lightning flashed farther away and left in its wake the darkness and a soft drizzle which fell around us like music through the leaves.”
From “I Had to Do Something”
Sample Short Stories
The Middle of Nowhere
Yellow Flowers
Invisible Life
Learning to Dream
“I was going somewhere where it snowed into the sea--Northern California or maybe Oregon. I wasn't certain of anything. It was the beginning for me of a sadness that, I suppose, had to come to me sometime, an aching that lasted for years.”
From "The Middle of Nowhere "