It's a Hard Cow

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

This is Terry Jordan’s first book, and it gives evidence of real
talent. But it might as well have been titled It’s a Bleak Read.

Jordan’s geographical environment is western North America, ranging
from Saskatchewan south to New Mexico. His psychological environment is
also characterized by vast, empty spaces. The protagonists of these
stories tend to be spiritually isolated and emotionally malnourished.
Often they are children growing up on desolate farms or in desolate
small towns, their fathers absent or violent. If they are adults, their
relationships fall apart, their spouses die, or they lose their jobs.
Their pain is usually of the dull, throbbing variety. “Bitterness is
mostly silence lying in wait,” comments one narrator, and that could
be an epigraph for the book. (Sometimes, though, there is a stagily
spectacular dénouement, as when a laid-off miner drives his pickup
through the window of a bank.)

It’s true that there are occasional hints that people’s lives need
not always be so cruelly circumscribed by malice and bad luck. And to
read almost any one of these stories is to be impressed by Jordan’s
potential. But to read eight of them in a row is to be concerned about a
promising writer teetering on the brink of self-parody—or perhaps
unconscious parody of such American writers as Richard Ford, whose
fiction chronicles the same aching void.

There is some variety in character, point of view, and setting, but the
tone remains relentlessly consistent throughout. Despite the leanness
and clarity of the prose, an oppressive fog from the characters’ lives
drifts up off the page into the reader’s mind. It’s an intense
vision, but very limited. One hopes that Jordan will grow beyond it,
fast.

Special mention must be made of the book’s cover, the ugliest I have
seen in recent years. Featuring a bizarre blend of a faint, urinous
yellow and a slushy gray, it seems calculated to repel browsers.