#667 The Archer- Robert Stone
This is like a Hunter S. Thompson story, but without the humor and with a lot of anger. Duffy is an art teacher who has a small mythology around campus. It is rumored that he once threatened to kill his wife and her lover with a crossbow that he pointed out them while wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and a tweed hat. He didn’t kill them, or lose his job, but he lost his wife and his house.
Now he was on the college lecture circuit. Most of the story revolves around one of these college trips to Pahoochee Sate University. He gets drunk, belligerent, arrested and can’t leave town until his case is cleared. I can believe that this guy—an asshole—did all that. But why do I care. There is no humor, or irony, or even a subtle wink to the reader that any of this is in good fun or for a reason—even tragic self-destruction would be fine. He’s just an asshole! The literary world is full of them—just like they are full of stories that want to sound like Hunter S. Thompson.
I wasn’t as impressed with this collection as I wanted to be. It’s ok, maybe a 6 out of 10 compared to the other collections I’ve read for this project. It’s weird though, I’ve picked up a few collections that claim to be “raw” or “edgy” stuff, with tough-talking, hard-drinking characters, like Stone, Denis Johnson, and Craig Davidson—usually a genre I really enjoy—all three have fallen short of the mark.
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