THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410030232
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
William Hoffman uncovers extraordinary things in ordinary people.
A maid brings a dictatorial employer to heel. An executive puts poverty - and resentment - behind him. A father finds belated faith in his son.
Hoffman's latest collection of short stories, Follow Me Home (Louisiana State University Press, 213 pp., $22.95) is a series of incisive portraits of obscure folk with offbeat backgrounds. Portraits, not pretty pictures; Hoffman does not insist upon redemption. What he shows instead is the inevitable consequence of early affliction, for good or for ill.
In ``Night Sport,'' a legless Vietnam veteran exacts an obscure revenge on a world he holds responsible for his disability. Stalking an able-bodied intruder, housebound Chip turns the tables on a surprisingly vulnerable adversary. But his twisted sense of mission holds no room for mercy, either on his enemy or himself.
For Chip, pain has become so attenuated and pervasive as to evolve into a terrible, self-absorbed pleasure.
``From the Maytag he lifted the knife he'd finished at rehab, the handle alternate layers of filed red, yellow and translucent Plexiglass salvaged from a smashed helicopter, the blade a VC bayonet shaped on an electric grinder. He opened cans with it, honed it patiently along his whetstone. The knife had the good feel of a balanced heft.''
In ``Dancer,'' an old woman losing her grip at last lets go, for good and all. In ``Sweet Armageddon,'' an aging and joyless preacher plays out his losing hand. In ``Boy Up a Tree,'' an advantaged girl, too accustomed to aloofness, fails to appreciate the fierce but unschooled affections of a disadvantaged boy.
So some of these stories tell us things that we emphatically do not want to know. But they tell it with such precision and grace, we are forced to learn from them. Listen to Hoffman's lyrical economy:
``She wasn't a bad woman, just bossy, and had never heard much music, though in her big house she owned a baby grand she couldn't play.''
``He was second-guessing himself into immobility.''
``She was a freckled redhead whose shrill voice could strip the hair off hide.''
It figures that Hoffman has been, is, a teacher. He taught English at Hampden-Sydney College. He also worked for a newspaper and a bank; the ivory tower has had its cinder block outbuildings for him.
Now he lives with his wife on a farm in Charlotte Court House, Va. (population 566). Not exactly quietly. The white-headed scribe with the longshoreman's face has won the Balch Prize, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and the Lytle and Goodheart prizes (twice). In the spring Hoffman will receive the Hillsdale Prize for Short Fiction, an award administered by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for exemplary regional artists.
The short story has enjoyed something of a revival over the past decade despite winnowing markets for it. It encompasses life in a sitting. It endures over a reading time that typically equates with a single college class, bell to bell.
Hoffman's sensibilities have been to college and earned advanced degrees. He can make us laugh and he can make us cry. In the process, he never trivializes the dark tangle of the human heart.
In ``Abide with Me,'' a farmer named Harmon feels compelled to fashion his vision of God by blasting a rock sculpture from a slope of Ram's Horn Mountain in Kentucky. Local kids call the figure ``St. Banana'' because of its long nose. SLAP, a University of Kentucky feminist organization, objects to deities projected as males.
The NAACP and the Jewish Defense League perceive it as a slur. Various theologians and denominational representatives investigate with alarm. The ACLU researches the legality of a sect inflicting religious views by erecting an effigy in sight of a federal highway.
Things happen; but Harmon holds fast to his personal vision and doesn't apologize for it. There's a rugged beauty to that. Just as there is to the unusual fictive vision of William Hoffman and the muscular prose that expresses it. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket illustration by DAVID HORTON
by CNB