Paul Scott Malone's first volume of stories, In an Arid Land, won
the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the best book of fiction
for 1995. His second book of stories raises his award-winning
standard. Memorial Day and Other Stories has a cast of characters
not easily forgotten; they are damaged young men struggling with a
hostile world -- or at least a world they don't always understand.
Malone's major theme is the angst of modern man. Even the women
characters -- and they are never the protagonists -- suffer from
one sort of anxiety or another.
In the title story, William, the narrator, drifts between
madness and distress and despair. In "Family Photos", Randy, the
main character, is on leave from an institution for the troubled to
visit his family. The more they try to draw him out, the more he
retreats into his near-madness. And in the novelette that ends the
volume, Dalrymple is not a disturbed person but a young man
desperately seeking himself as he prepares to be drafted for
service in the Vietnam War. His anxiety comes from his broken
marriage, his fear of going to war, and his inability to make
himself grow up. In "The Solitary Heart", one of the few stories
with a major woman character, we see a pair of artists -- man and
wife? -- who carve out lives together yet really live alone. They
work and eat together, but at night each goes to a solitary
bed.
Malone does not write happy stories, but his work probes the
depths of human emotion and opens for readers windows into the
minds of people in more distress than they are. Or so we hope.
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