NOCTURNAL AMERICA

John Keeble

University of Nebraska Press

1111 Lincoln Mall

Lincln, Nebraska 68588-0630

Paper, 267 pages, $26.95

ISBN 0-8032-2777-9

ISBN 978-0-8032-2777-4

Previously published in Bloomsbury Review

John Keeble is one of many fine writers we remain largely ignorant of primarily because he writes serious fiction which most of the public won t take seriously. In France, a new work of literary merit may be front page news. In America, it gets a print run of a few thousand, no mention in the mainstream media, and dies by disappearing. What that says about the French and Americans is something not often discussed in a time in when we have freedom fries in the White House. But Keeble s fiction in Nocturnal America is not about politics or how we may be different from those who live on the other side of the Atlantic. It s not about urban angst or suburban isolation. It s not about the self-inflicted wounds of fops in universities. It s about the raw edge of rural folk, and it s not easy reading. It is, however, fiction with characterization as deep and broad as any writer might draw at times luminous, at times heartbreaking.

It is also the winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize for Fiction, and with this collection of stories, written between 1976 and 2004, the University of Nebraska Press proves again its ability to print what deserves to be published and what isn t being published elsewhere.

In The Chasm, Keeble explores and defines the struggle of a young couple to build a house with their own hands, how the sudden and accidental death of a neighbor is a silent terror in their lives, and how the wife, not the husband, refuses to give up and binds them together.

In The Transmission, Keeble takes the simple act of levering a thousand pound transmission up planks and onto the bed of a pickup and transforms it into a dramatic showdown between husband and wife, husband and neighbor, husband and uncle, and what becomes the tattered remnants of loyalty and betrayal.

In The Fishers, a woman marries, moves to a rural community, raises her children, loses her husband in an accident, loses the woodlot (which her husband carefully timbered all his life) to a fire she unintentionally set, and disappears a poignant symbol of all that s left to her.

In Chickens, a young boy in a small Canadian prairie town watches the town slowly rise up in anger against an outsider an immigrant German, tall and blond who arrives after WWII and cares not what others might think of him or what he is doing.

In Zeta s House, there is the disquietude of seeking consolation from the loss of a child through the simple act of shucking and shelling corn. And there is this memory of the child and what she brought forth in the world before she died:

It sounds like it s raining, she said. Everyone listened. But in the quiet of the kitchen, the refrigerator made a ticking noise like the sound of water dripping from an eave, and a bubbling pot on the stove sounded exactly like a spring rain driven against the roof. For a moment we all entered the phantasm. Having her there seemed a gift. It was as if she d been sent to us to stand watch for a time at the entrance to the other, adjacent world.

These are stories with an edge so sharp it cuts as you read, but they also hold the soft place of a conflicted heart. Writers like Keeble do not often tell us what we want to know, but what we fear to know. If Nocturnal America is often dark, Keeble s work also sometimes flickers with a distant light we would like to find.