Review of Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy--Susan Bono of Tiny Lights

I haven’t finished reading Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh, a collection of short stories from Graywolf Press. The 2009 Mendocino Writers Conference gave me too many other things to read and think about, as usual. But after the first three stories, I can already urge you to get your hands on a copy.

Maybe you won’t lose yourself in the stories the way I did, staying up too late and feeling like hell the next morning. Maybe you won’t be fascinated by the young couple in “The Caves in Oregon” whose first home happens to be built over the mouth of a cave, but you just might be shocked by how tolerant Percy can make you for the fist fighting and other blood sports featured in the title story and in the hair-raising “The Woods,” which I read with the literary equivalent of my hand in front of my face, peeking through my fingers, afraid to look, incapable of turning away. Now that I know how these stories turn out, I’m going to have to read them for the utter gorgeousness of their language, to study how the measured cadence of each sentence makes music.

I’m going to include a few examples of Percy’s fine writing here, but how to choose? Every page teems with great sentences, and the accumulated effect is part of the dazzle.

Here are a few, selected almost at random from those first stories:

“In this waterless stillness, you could hear every chipmunk within a square acre, rustling for pine nuts, and when the breeze rose into a cold wind, the forest became a giant whisper.”  (from “Refresh, Refresh”)

“Sometimes he imagines a rotten spot inside her, like a bruised bit of peach he wants to carve away with a knife.” (from “The Caves in Oregon”)

“Once we entered the forest the pines put a black color on things, and through their branches dropped a wet wind that carried with it the smell of the nearby mountains.” (from “The Woods”)

OK, so maybe the guy used up his rock-solid, totally believable characters and irresistible situations in the first three stories. And maybe by the end of the book I won’t feel as if I’ve come closer to understanding and appreciating Eastern Oregon, a geography that’s generally considered pretty much unlovable.  But I doubt it.

Comments

[Graham Moody]

His hard-won words pushed up from the dank forest floor and brought forth the efflorescence of myth.

[Denise Wakeman]

I also bought Refresh, Refresh while I was at the conference. I read the first couple of stories on my flight home. I was blown away by the title story. Beautiful imagery, tough story and exceptional use of language. I felt drained yet exhilarated when I finished the story. Two thumbs up!

[Jill Myers]

What's always interesting to me at the conference is how the persona of the author as presented in his stories often doesn't match up with the one you get to know when you attend his lectures. Who would have guessed that this interesting looking young man, so amusing that one wonders about an alternate career as a stand-up comedian, would also have such an eviable ability to construct those perfect, poetic phrases. That's just another book whose cover I'll have to rip off and throw away. Will I ever learn?