Thank You for Being Concerned and Sensitive (Hardcover, New)

A first collection of 12 stories, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award for 1997. Henry's young characters decry the existential angst of the generation that preceded theirs, and yet often end up embracing it. In "Mouthfeel," for instance, a married couple seems to have a happy future, until the wife begins to see pointlessness all around her and goes mad - the implication seeming to be that madness may be a sane response to a culture obsessed with throw-away goods, meaningless sex, and money that can never buy happiness. In the strange "Motherhurt," Henry highlights depression in ordinary surroundings by wildly exaggerating the rituals that families go through to cheer up their own - in this case, a mother. The rituals begin to seem extreme, even bizarre. Henry appears to want to argue that insanity is only what we say it is, and that "normal" behavior is never far from insanity. "Congressman Spoonbender," told in an exact, detached style, concerns an aging congressman who's losing his sense of purpose. He calls his mistress back in Ohio, who's drunk and getting drunker, to find his bearings, but she can't help, can't even understand him. Finally, Henry takes a rather maudlin turn in "The Prodigal Corpse," in which the narrator's father returns from the grave to make a few astringent comments about life and death and to settle one score with his wife, who for 20 years was afraid of the word "penis." After he's made her say the word, he's content to return to the grave. Ann Beattie, final judge for the award, compares Henry's sense of humor to Donald Barthelme's, and there is indeed a kind of skewed, grim, and even misanthropic comedy lurking here that may be what gives most promise to this debut. (Kirkus Reviews)

Jim Henry's stories defy convention. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes. Although the plots varyOCofrom a corpse returning to visit his family weeks after his burial, to the musings of a congressman grappling with the weight of history, to a wealthy family's elaborate plot to cheer their mysteriously wounded motherOCoall express a sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the absurd in the everyday.

Henry's characters are for the most part misfits, outsiders looking in on a world whose seemingly natural order is turned upside down. In a throw-away culture obsessed with sex and drugs, money and God, they struggle to connect with what is real while trying to convince themselves that anything is. And yet in the midst of their existential searching there remains always Henry's quirky sense of humor. As one character says, OC Anything is possible, OCO and in this collection anything and everything happens."

General

Imprint:	University of Iowa Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	October 1997
First published:	October 1997
Authors:	Jim Henry
Dimensions:	139 x 235 x 17mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	152
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-87745-610-0
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-87745-610-0
Barcode:	9780877456100

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