New Orleans Is Sinking

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Jarman’s muscular prose has never been better than in this powerful
collection of nine previously published stories. Death; disease; many
defeats, few victories—Jarman’s writing is marked by a sense of
fatalism. The pieces, all written in the first person, draw the reader
into a world made frighteningly real. In “Dangle,” a game played by
father and son goes tragically wrong. The title story describes the
drowning death of a hotel guest.

“Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World,” the last piece,
is the most fully realized. A man travels from Canada to California to
help his mother deal with the sudden death of his father. Jarman’s
descriptions of California are glaring and harsh: “In Solana Beach and
Encinitas and Leucadia and Cardiff storefronts are empty: blank computer
shops and hardware stories with For Lease signs ... Time out of joint,
failure in a sunny land with no tolerance for failure, no visible
mythology of failure, only of sun, youth, cheesy surf guitars, wild
success.” This strong and provocative collection is highly
recommended.