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195 pages
$15.95
When a house burns to the ground, a man must come to terms with the limits of memory and friendship. After his father’s death, a boy lures a fellow camper into the woods and savagely beats him. These are representative characters mostly troubled men and boys in Fires of Our Choosing, the debut short-story collection by Eugene Cross, a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, who now lives in Chicago and teaches fiction writing at Columbia College.
An emerging talent whose stories have appeared in many of the best literary journals, Cross could become his generation’s Richard Ford, chronicling the mischievous, bewildered, and often devilishly funny ways of the American male. Unlike Mr. Ford’s best-known short fiction, however, these stories are not dramatized retellings of long-ago events burned into memory. Instead, Cross investigates how men and boys handle the echoes of their misfortunes, their pain and poor decisions like a ringing in the ear. These characters keep clawing at life, even when they know it’s no use.
The violence in these stories, tempered with a darkly comic worldview, is used to deepen the characterization of these men and boys. Marty, the bully in Rosaleen, If You Know What I Mean, is asked during an anger management session to recount something he’s proud of, but he can only think of having taught his hamster to fetch. The hamster’s name, for the record, is LeBron James. When a girl in the therapy session shares the story of an enduring urban legend about hamsters that she read about online, Marty doesn’t believe it. The girl counters with a line of dialogue that quietly reverberates throughout the collection: “If you can teach them to fetch, she said, it seems to me anything’s possible.”
Readers will likewise believe that anything is possible in this impressive debut. A respectable range is on display in “Come August,” written in the second person, and in the even shorter “This Too,” but they’re more like embers alongside the searing blaze of “The Brother,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and the remarkable title story, which reminds us that uncertainty matches our every step, “that wind could sweep you off the road, or else the earth could open up and swallow you whole.”