Friday's Forgotten Book: A Stranger In This World

A Stranger In This World by Kevin Canty, published in 1994, doesn’t seem to enjoy the afterlife it deserves. It’s both a first book and a short story collection, and, as in a lot of literary short fiction, many of the tales here end with an epiphany. The difference here is, the epiphanies always arrive too late. The characters are captured at the exact moment they fall through the cracks. (One story begins: “Let’s say things stop working out for you.” By paragraph’s end, it’s no longer hypothetical. And it's a short paragraph.) Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son was published a few years earlier, and I think that, for a time (as with Raymond Carver the previous decade), any fiction with protagonists on the margins of society was measured by the Jesus’ Son yardstick and found wanting. Compared to these stories, though, the characters in Jesus’ Son are playing in a sandbox. There’s real hurt in A Stranger In This World, and the characters in “Pretty Judy” and “Junk” and “Blue Boy” aren’t headed to a better place, but Canty’s tough, elegant prose makes their journeys rewarding.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.