Twenty Stories by Jack Driscoll (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Twenty Stories by Jack Driscoll
• Bob Duxbury (bio)

twenty stories Jack Driscoll
Pushcart Press
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/721973/twenty-stories-by-jack-driscoll/9798985469714
280 pages; Print, $27.00

If you're seeking a homegrown version of Nordic noir, with snow-flecked, frigid scenery and hardbitten characters in dysfunctional relationships intent upon a desire for justice or vengeance, then forgo Stockholm or Helsinki for Northern Michigan's veteran storyteller, Jack Driscoll, and his combination of old and new work in the recently published Twenty Stories.

Not that there are so many actual crimes. There is an execution, theft and trespass, and a couple who steal a horse. But the whodunit aspect of Driscoll's work is centered upon his characters' ceaseless investigation of their own lives as a crime scene. Are they victim or perp? Sometimes only one, but often both.

As in any investigation, we enter Driscoll's stories after the event. The character in his first story is named Judge, and a first line like "Doyle Laidlow has never attended an execution" assures us there's some catching up to be done. Likewise, "here's what the guy I don't live with anymore said." Sometimes the titles alone steer us to the police blotter: "Death Parts," "Prowlers," or "A Woman Gone Missing."

Early in the first story, Driscoll tells us his authorial ambition:

Judge said you could measure a story by its private disclosures, by how far a person came forward to confess a part of himself asking forgiveness.

In this story ("Wanting Only to be Heard"), Judge is a teenager, aided by the narrator, who decides to make a reckless swim at night between two fishing [End Page 88] holes under a frozen lake. The fact that such a venture is both obviously dangerous and foolhardy is dismissed. Yet the narrator notes:

There was something principled about facts. … Maybe that's why I liked Dragnet so much. The claim that it was a true story, and that the sentence handed down after the last TV commercial was really being served.

The tension in many of the stories lies between establishing the "crime" and seeking some kind of personal, rather than societal, retribution. Driscoll's characters are not short of grievances, but the crimes as such do not usually fall directly under conventional jurisprudence. The characters have been victims of parental neglect, adultery, addiction, an economic system that regards them as marginal, poor education, or just plain bad luck.

A combination of these factors infuses a new story, "The New World Emerging," ostensibly referring to the mother's job in a hospital that includes infant births on one floor, and a geriatric facility above them. The young narrator has been badly mauled by two dogs and has been held back in school, causing not only physical and emotional grief but also catastrophic medical costs. "One week after the feeding tube had been removed" the narrator returns to school, where he is confronted by his Supreme Court justice teacher, "decked out in his Perry Mason robe," and "on the blackboard had been printed my full legal name … along with some made-up case number."

In the real world, meanwhile, the owners of the dogs responsible for the injury are intransigent, and their behavior

justified in no way the pittance they'd offer, not to mention they'd never so much sent an apology or get well card, and the lawyer, shaking his head, [said] … "What's done is done … Just go ahead and settle. Move on."

But the father in this story can't move on. Not only does the plastic at their home's window act "so even in broad daylight the world's a blur," but "It's like this underfurnished 1950s house trailer has been tented over to fumigate some vile and incurable infestation."

Father and son stand vigil over the offending couple's house late into the night, the father's watch on the dashboard indicating when they must drive [End Page 89] off to pick up the mother from her hospital shift: a bleakly haunting image for midlife, not least for its mute pleading for some sort of intervention...