I really like how Jack Driscoll's new story collection surprised me: it pushed harder in its voice, its scope, and its storytelling than I anticipated. As I wrote in my new review in The Detroit Free Press, these ten tales "hinge on the circularity of memory and place." When I spoke with the author, who lives in Interlochen, he expanded on this in interesting ways:
I've never dealt so specifically with the motif of time. Everything is in a state of vanishing or commencement. The past and present are not really separate. I make use of flashback and memory in my stories -- to understand the present is, of course, to understand the past."Another function of time is the narrator. Here, I have one as young as 14, who doesn't have a large past, and as old as 77 in the title story, which is the anchor of the book and placed last -- that one takes place over one night, as he stands outside and relives his past as an AP war photographer and a photographer of mass suicide. He remembers being on the parallel bars at (the University of) Michigan, where he was a gymnast. This is the way the mind works, measuring our present against our past.
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