Drowned Boy

by Jerry Gabriel, Andrea Barrett (Selected by)

Overview

The winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Towson Prize for Literature. “Exquisite storytelling” from the author of The Let Go (Foreword Reviews).
 
Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In “Boys Industrial School,” two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment—set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.
 
“Eight linked stories, set among boys and men in southern Ohio, have the masculine virtues of honest craft and plain, carefully chosen language . . . Writing that sticks with the reader much longer than showier fiction.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“A nuanced and complicated examination of the way grief is contagious, sparking dark emotions in people who initially are barely affected.” —Time Out Chicago
 
“In prose as spare and enchanting as the town’s landscape, Gabriel paints a beautiful and sobering portrait of Middle Americans trapped in a world of snow, ice, and inevitability.” —Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936747429
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Series:	Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	155
File size:	330 KB

About the Author

Jerry Gabriel studied at Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a science writer and taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including, from 2001 to 2008, Cornell University's Engineering Communications Program. Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
In Moraine, Ohio, a single highway is the only link to the outside world. The names of its streets are unadorned: Market, Mulberry, and Main. Home to a crumbling high school, a few fast-food places, and a sluggish river that cleverly reversed direction, Moraine is a postindustrial speck in southern Ohio bordered by Appalachia and West Virginia, an isolated community where change comes slowly, if at all.

In Gabriel’s evocative collection, this sense of place is defining and connects each of the characters’ lives – parents, children, teachers, coaches, and the loners – those who somehow end up in Moraine rather than somewhere else. While a few are young enough to remember where another choice might have led, most are too dug in to care: a teenager who witnesses a drowning, a young man who abandons a once passionate love, children who crossed paths with an escaped convict.

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (adjudicated by National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett), Gabriel’s debut is remarkably wise and affecting – a lament for childhoods long gone and the innocence and hope that’s left behind. Simply told and gracefully written, Gabriel’s stories coil around in your head – lingering, suggesting, probing – their heartfelt effect built word by word and line by line.

In this low-key, lusterless debut collection, Gabriel follows two brothers growing up while testing the boundaries of authority in rural Ohio. Switching among different viewpoints in quasi-chronological order, Gabriel begins with Donnie and Nate Holland, ages 12 and eight, respectively, tracking down a runaway from the nearby delinquent boys' institution after their father is hospitalized. Instead of turning in the runaway for the reward, however, Donnie ends up disappearing with him for two days. In subsequent stories, the boys reach adolescence and young adulthood, Donnie continuing to run against the grain, joining the army and eloping; Nate, meanwhile, remains in town and works at the A&P, but still takes cues from his beloved big brother. Gabriel's writing is frustratingly bland, his character development minimal and his stories all too brief; in the longest tale, “Drowned Boy,” Nate and a girl meet at a wake, but take off on separate, meandering car trips, suspending the resolution in midair. Gabriel's listless plotting leaves readers wanting more of these sympathetic characters. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Small-town, economically depressed Moraine, OH, serves as background for these connected stories centering on the awkward coming-of-age of Nate Holland and his relationship with his older brother, Donnie. In Gabriel's first volume of fiction, the bare and austere landscape is reflected in the tightly written, almost stripped, prose. In "Boys Industrial School," the brothers track a boy who has escaped through the snow from the local reform school, hoping for a reward if they turn him in to authorities. Instead, Donnie ends up running off and helping the escapee get away. In the title story, a series of episodes follows Nate and another student who try to make sense of a classmate's death by drowning. In the final story, "Reagan's Army in Retreat," Nate tracks Donnie to their childhood home, only to discover he had left for Texas six months earlier. VERDICT Despite a bleak tone, Gabriel nicely crystallizes a sense of place and ably develops the emotional life of the main characters. For readers of literary fiction.—Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA

Library Journal