THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508100679
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: By JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
BIG AS LIFE
Stories About Men
RAND RICHARDS COOPER
Dial. 323 pp. $21.95.
The subtitle of this collection of stories is accurate to a point - the main characters are males - but ``men'' may not be the best word. Rand Richards Cooper, author of The Last to Go, seems to find a boy in almost every story.
The pieces at the beginning of the volume are about kids. Andy Hatter in ``Faith in the System,'' is 10, summer-camp age. His parents drop him off abruptly; he's a little scared being on his own. But before long, he learns to make bad jokes; the boys bond as one lights intestinal gas; and Andy fears to take up for the camp outcast. Details match the situation, but we never see Andy as other than pretty ordinary.
A 17-year-old lifeguard in ``The Prick of the Season'' falls in love with a married woman nearly twice his age. As the comment in the story about the film ``Summer of '42'' only confirms, the story follows the predictable teenage boy's first-time-with-an-older-woman archetype. Like the boy in John Updike's often anthologized story ``A & P,'' Tony blows his balancing act - between virginal girlfriend and lusty married woman - by saying one thing too many. While the plot seems not very novel, Cooper gives his protagonist the same elegiac sense of loss as Updike's Sammy.
Some stories feature older men, but they often act boyishly, pursuing girls who are considerably younger or attaching themselves to younger males.
In ``Big as Life,'' a father exaggerates to his son how well he knew basketball star Larry Bird in college. It's a lie that nearly blows up in his face. Or in the last piece, ``The Cobbler's Kid,'' an aging former GI returns to Germany to find a boy (now grown up and a father) he had befriended during the war. Neither central character is very secure in himself; like many of the other males here, each seems psychologically little more than a boy.
The contrast between the primal death-wish power of the males in Thom Jones' stories and the fragile, often childish sensibilities of the man wannabes in Cooper's pieces could not be more pronounced. Cooper has a firm grasp of details, and he does best with chronicling the little losses and lies to self that plague his characters. I just found myself wishing that a few stories were more urgent than the ones here. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is chairman of the English department at Old
Dominion University. by CNB