August Nights

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

August Nights is Hugh Hood’s twentieth book. Like many of his fans, I admire his industry — and I wish, for all our sakes, that he weren’t quite so prolific. Ernest Hemingway once explained that he wasn’t trying to write stories with a “wow” at the end. Hugh Hood isn’t trying to write such stories either. I still wish he’d write a little less and allow the pressure to build a little before he sits down at his desk.

August Nights is a perfectly creditable collection of 13 stories. Fans of Hood will relish typical touches: the deft touch with a phrase, so swift to fix a subject (a fat green caterpillar straining blindly and interminably to make its way over a dirt road “reminded Bronson of some of the people who had gone to university with him”), and the customary ease and sureness with which he indicates the abyss at our middle-class feet (as in “Bees, Flies, and Chickens,’ as good a story about an encounter with death as I have read in a long time). And yet, for all their welcome freedom from pyrotechnics, and for all their delightful turns and surprises, the cumulative effect of these stories is a diffuseness, a prose not wrapped tightly enough. One admires the talent — and wishes for a little more discipline.