rev. of Kick in the Head by Steven Rinehart
by
Kick in the Head
Stories by Steven Rinehart. Doubleday, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron.
Steven Rinehart's debut collection of stories,
Kick in the Head, presents an ensemble of characters pushed through the edge to an abominable and shocking other side, while at the same time giving us tales that are always magnetic, entertaining, and sophisticated. In a dozen different ways, often using members of the same cast, Rinehart artfully portrays sinister pressure systems and people who either change them or cannot escape them.
The gruesome and disturbing "Burning Luv," about a hitchhiker bent on revenge, is both resiliently grim and yet irresistibly authentic. "The cowboy hadn't said goodbye," the narrator tells us as he is left alone in the middle of the desert, "he just took off while I was under the bridge taking a leak. . . . It felt like the quiet you might hear inside a bathroom, late at night in a bus station. It was a quiet that hurt, the way dying alone in the snow might hurt."
In "Mr. Big Stuff," a slyly funny barroom brawl of a story, the recurrent character of Chris Bergman tries to rescue a woman slugged by a fat guy wielding an empty bottle, only to have her girlfriend try to turn him into a cop arriving late on the scene. "Look," the cop tells her. "All I know is when I showed up this guy was the only one doing anything. Maybe he's the good guy. You ever think of that."
In stories with enormous stakes, and with eye-poppingly precise comparisons and laugh-out-loud humorous jabs, Rinehart shows how hard it is to be a good guy in a world that has turned desperate. There are men at an impromptu strip party "gathered tight around the table, like a Last Supper of goons," and there's a girl who is "ruggedly handsome, attractive in an oddly virile way, like a tough cowgirl in a bad Western. . . . Even in a halter-top she looked like she belonged in Special Forces."
The humor evolves story by story in the timing of the dialogue and the ironic and yet deeply felt wisdom of the perceptions. "I didn't like college at first," Bergman says in "Outstanding in My Field," "so I dropped out to go back and be with my friends full time." One such friend is "a farmer's kid, bright and healthy and strong. We didn't let him drink because when he got drunk he hit his head against walls and cars and tree trunks and cried into the crook of his elbow. 'I'm going to Hell,' he would cry. 'I'm just going straight to Hell.' He was religious and hard on himself." "It's just that I have no respect for men," a uniquely conflicted diabetic veterinarian tells Bergman in the title story, as he fails nobly in trying to rescue her from herself. "No offense, it just makes it kind of hard." "Not for me," Bergman says. "Respect is overrated."
Such sly humor is also deadly serious. The characters in
Kick in the Head show an elegant and wise despair in the face of rage, violence, and unfairness; and Rinehart's endings are masterful, dropping the reader off a narrative cliff into a midair of resonance so thick you never quite land.
Fred Leebron is the author of the novels Six Figures
and Out West,
and co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
He teaches at Gettysburg College.