rev. of A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson

A Brief History of Male Nudes in America 
Stories by Dianne Nelson. Univ. of Georgia Press, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen.

In
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America, Dianne Nelson’s first story collection, the element of place — a ranch in Nevada, a tent in Kansas, or a hotel in Santa Fe — is more than a backdrop for action; it is an integral part of each character’s life. “A Map of Kansas,” for instance, is a chilling story about a large family reunion at which the narrator’s anorexic sister, Katie, has become silent and aloof; as her body grows thinner, she seems to be disappearing into the landscape: “In Kansas in the dark, my sister is all softness and memory as she sits there rehearsing the silence that will steadily grow around her. Katie — the riddleless woods, the renderless garden. Not far away, I am looking at her, thinking of her. I am listening to the crickets shape and reshape this fierce world.”

Several of Nelson’s characters, bogged down by familial problems, search for momentum. In the title story, a teenage girl is tired of the seemingly endless parade of men who have visited her mother. One night, after she hears her mother in bed with yet another man, she decides to run away, but then turns back: “At last I’m calm on those sidewalks, I’m limp and light. I watch my feet all the way home, step after step — no melody, no rhythm — until all I know is the beauty of my own shoes.”

In one of the best stories in the collection, “Ground Rules,” Lewis and his thirteen-year-old son go to the home of the woman who abandoned them three years earlier “in the unlucky state of Missouri.” They believe they will get their lives back on track by stealing Lewis’s toddler son. After the abduction, with both boys asleep in the car, Lewis imagines “everything they would do: ski and rebuild engines, hang a Christmas Piñata from the back tree, they would swim and cook eggs with Tabasco, grow some Indian corn. On and on it went in Lewis’s mind until he grew tender with the largeness of their lives, until sometime after midnight — the boys still sleeping, the chain-link of stars glimmering above — they crossed the line into the sweet, big grainbelt of Kansas.”

Nelson uses an extraordinary range of language — provincial, heightened, commonplace, metaphoric, crass — and while some passages are slightly excessive, the overall style is very effective. A down-to-earth tone prevails, aided by the fact that even Nelson’s most exotic characters can speak unself-consciously about anything: sex; nudity; loving, strange, violent thoughts. These nebulous, difficult topics come to rest on the same plane with the everyday realities of living.

The narrator of “Paperweight” laments, “If it weren’t for my body, I could fly.” The issue for her, as for other characters, is whether she can wade through the overwhelming nuances of surface and place and ultimately ground herself. She falls in love with a man because he is increasingly
present — “he stood complicating the darkness” — and, later, when she thinks of her body next to his, she sees “how time is a ritual, a complicated working out of who will reach over and turn the lamp off at night, of how things will finally be said and done.”