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Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Iowa Short Fiction Award)
by Jim Tomlinson
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780877459910 
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Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
The stories in Things Kept, Things Left Behind explore the ambiguities of kept secrets, the tangles of abandoned pasts, and uneasy accommodations. Jim Tomlinson's characters each face the desire to reclaim dreams left behind, along with something of the dreamer that was also lost. Starkly rendered, these spiraling characters inhabit a specific place and class — small-town Kentucky, working-class America — but the stories, told in all their humor and tragedy, are universal.
In each story the characters face conflict, sometimes within themselves, sometimes with each other. Each carries a past and with it an urge to return and repair. In "First Husband, First Wife," ex-spouses are repeatedly drawn together by a shared history they cannot seem to escape, and they are finally forced to choose between leaving the past or leaving each other. LeAnn and Cass are grown sisters who conspire to help their prideful mother in "Things Kept." "Prologue" is a voyeuristic journey through the surprisingly different lives of two star-crossed friends, each with its successes and pitfalls, told through their letters over thirty-five years. In "Stainless," Annie and Warren divide their possessions on the final night of their marriage. Their realtor has advised them to "declutter" the house they are leaving, but they discover that most of the clutter cannot be so easily removed. The choices are never simple, and for every thing kept, something must be abandoned.
Tomlinson's characters struggle but eventually find their way, often unknowingly, to points of departure, to places where things just might change.
Review:
"A rural Kentucky where pride and familial honor are sacrosanct, old flames don't extinguish quietly and secrets are hard to keep centers Tomlinson's debut story collection. In the finely wrought 'Flights,' a writer sits at his father's bedside transcribing the dying man's remembrances, but a cunning shift in perspective shows the real power they hold for the son. The companion stories 'Things Kept' and 'Things Left Behind' examine what can be salvaged in marriage and what can't. In the first, LeAnn McCray, one of eight children, is summoned home from Ohio by her sister Cass. Cass's plan to square their ailing mother's looming debts by selling off their dead father's valuable desk runs smack into their mother's unselfish love for him. In 'Things Left Behind,' LeAnn's lover, Dex, sees in her, and in his 187 days of sobriety, a future beyond the next week and his humdrum married life; LeAnn's controlling husband, Lonnie, feels his life and wife 'slowly spinning away from him' and soon faces a choice of whether to let her go. Tomlinson frames the characters' rich vernaculars simply, and carefully sets the pasts they're desperate to reconcile and repair within bleak, unvarnished presents." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"A wonderful collection notable for its clean prose and tone of quiet, stubborn dignity." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Jim Tomlinson uses the traditional gifts of the writer — love of place, a keen eye for the telling detail, unflagging interest in the human heart — to bring to life a very specific and eye-opening version of America, particularly working-class, rural America. In Things Kept, Things Left Behind, his care for these people and his generosity toward them are evident on every page." George Saunders
Review:
"Jim Tomlinson's Things Kept, Things Left Behind is a splendid debut collection of short stories that explores the enduring theme of our quest for an identity. Though deeply connected to the spirit of small towns, these stories reveal aspects of the human condition that have universal resonance. This is an impressive first book in a venerable series by a very talented new voice in American fiction." Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
About the Author
Jim Tomlinson has published short fiction in Five Points, the Pinch, and Shenandoah. He was awarded the 2005 Al Smith Fellowship for Fiction by the Kentucky Arts Council. He grew up in a small Illinois town and now lives with his wife in rural Kentucky, where he is hard at work on a novel.
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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
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olivasdan, February 4, 2007 (view all comments by olivasdan)
Book Review
By Daniel A. Olivas
There's much to be said for those who pen their first books at an age when many working folks are winding down their careers. Such writers can draw upon decades of experience, giving their writing the kind of nuance and ambiguity that comes with mature hindsight.
For these reasons, one may rejoice in Jim Tomlinson's debut short-story collection, "Things Kept, Things Left Behind" (University of Iowa Press, $15.95 paperback), for which Tomlinson won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Born in 1941 three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomlinson grew up in a small Illinois town and now lives in rural Kentucky. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the 11 short stories in this collection have the Bluegrass State as their backdrop and have struggling, working-class folks at their center.
An example is LeAnn McCray, who appears in the two title stories, "Things Kept" and "Things Left Behind." In the first, we learn that LeAnn sometimes "felt restless, strange to her own skin. It was a troublesome feeling, one that would come on her without warning, as it did one Tuesday afternoon in late October."
That day, LeAnn's sister, Cass, needs to talk about helping their stubborn and widowed mother, Georgia, out of debt. Cass suggests that LeAnn ask a mutual friend, Dexter Chalk, for help. The married LeAnn agrees, never letting on that she and Dexter are having an affair. The plan to aid Georgia spirals into an unintended climax, in which LeAnn learns that it's not just the living who have secrets.
In "Things Left Behind," LeAnn's secret affair with Dexter is unwittingly divulged to her husband, Lonnie, by a well-intentioned hotel maid. Because Lonnie is far from a perfect husband and father, Tomlinson allows ambiguity to seep into LeAnn's infidelity.
In "Prologue (two lives in letters)," we are introduced to two young, idealistic teenagers, Davis Menifee Jr. and Claire Lyons, through a sampling of their correspondence spanning 34 years.
Thrown together as delegates to the 1963 Congressional Youth Leadership Conference for one week in Washington, D.C., Davis and Claire become close friends in the wake of Kennedy's assassination and political uncertainty. But they take radically different paths. Claire becomes an activist lawyer and eventually a member of Congress. Davis protests the Vietnam War and flees to Canada to evade the draft.
Both start families, question their choices, wonder where their youth has gone, and hope for better times. For many readers who have spent a few decades on this good earth, the words of these two Americans may be painfully familiar.
There are other gems in this collection: In "Stainless," Warren and Annie have one last dinner together as they divide up their belongings at the end of their marriage. In "Squirrels," a man is bedeviled by his ex-wife because she is bedeviled by squirrels that invaded her attic. And there are the two brothers in "Lake Charles" who share a bond forged in a horrendous, life-altering childhood accident. In such stories, Tomlinson keeps his observations and humor sharp, his prose lean as a marathon runner.
Sometimes in a Tomlinson tale, it's difficult to tell the winners from the losers, the resilient from the fragile. But his magic lies in the shadows of people's lives, those dark recesses where uncertainty reigns.
It's as if Tomlinson holds a mirror up to us and says: It's all a confusing mess, but we will survive because the other option is just too damn scary.
This is unadorned wisdom earned through experience. And it takes a skilled, mature writer such as Tomlinson to bring it to life.
[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]
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Mary Akers, January 10, 2007 (view all comments by Mary Akers)
I loved so much about Jim Tomlinson's short story collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind. It was one of those reads that I felt compelled to carefully portion out so as to not have it be over too quickly. I wanted to savor it. I hated for it to end.
The book has a beautiful, poignantly apt cover design with a number of excellent blurbs on the back, but one blurb in particular expressed what I found most to love about the collection. George Saunders wrote, "Jim Tomlinson uses the traditional gifts of the writer--love of place, a keen eye for the telling detail, unflagging interest in the human heart--to bring to life a very specific and eye-opening version of America, particularly working-class, rural America...his care for these people and his generosity toward them are evident on every page."
What I most wanted to do was point to Saunders' words and shout, "What he said!" But that would do a disservice to all of Jim's hard work and I truly was transported by the very real characters and their situations, so who better to discuss the book than me? I am a product of that "working-class rural America" that Saunders mentions and when Cass (in the the half-title story "Things Kept") says, "When he comes to see Ma, don't matter if it's a hundred degrees, Dale here is wearing long sleeves so she don't see them tattoos he's got drawed on his arms," I KNOW her. She is utterly, absolutely real to me.
And in particular, I was impressed by how the women in Things Kept, Things Left Behind are portrayed. In the reading, I had the sense that, while writing, Jim allowed them to live and breathe. They have flaws and desires and idiosyncracies that allowed me to see and appreciate them, warts and all--like real people. I think that can be difficult enough when we are creating characters; doubly so when we are creating characters across a gender divide. But there is no gender divide in this collection. Men cheat, women cheat, men love obsessively, women love obsessively, both succeed, both fail. It is such an even-handed look at what makes us human.
It was such a pleasure to read a book of stories in which the characters are allowed to blunder and fumble and generally be human, without commentary (spoken or unspoken) from the author. "They are who they are," Tomlinson seems to say. "I just write about 'em, I don't judge 'em."
And thank goodness for that.
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Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780877459910
- Author:
- Publisher:
- University of Iowa Press
- Subject:
- Short Stories (single author)
- Subject:
- Stories (single author)
- Edition Description:
- Paperback
- Series:
- Iowa Short Fiction Award
- Publication Date:
- October 2006
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 153
- Dimensions:
- 9.28x5.60x.47 in. .54 lbs.
