River Teeth: Stories and Writings (U)

In his passionate, luminous novels, David James Duncan has won the devotion of countless critics and readers, earning comparisons to Harper Lee, Tom Robbins, and J.D. Salinger, to name just a few. Now Duncan distills his remarkable powers of observation into this unique collection of short stories and essays. At the heart of Duncan's tales are characters undergoing the complex and violent process of transformation, with results both painful and wondrous. Equally affecting are his nonfiction reminiscences, the river teeth of the title. He likens his memories to the remains of old-growth trees that fall into Northwestern rivers and are sculpted by time and water. These experiences shaped by his own river of time are related with the art and grace of a master storyteller. In River Teeth, a uniquely gifted American writer blends two forms, taking us into the rivers of truth and make-believe, and all that lies in between.Publishers WeeklyThe enormously popular writer of The River Why and The Brothers K offers an eclectic collection of fiction and nonfiction, in which the latter entries pack the greater wallop. There's a whimsical, sentimental and very Zen sensibility at work in the short stories, although Theme and Meaning often strut too blatantly. In one story, a young girl learns the frustrating distinctions between fantasy and reality when her garbage man becomes to her a mythical figure like Santa Claus. In ``Not Rocking the Boats,'' Duncan revisits his river terrain when an ardent and usually drunk fly-fisherman confronts a packaged fishing tour operator. The strongest entries are nonfiction pieces that Duncan calls ``river teeth,'' a term he draws from fallen old-growth trees that are whittled down by rivers to their last and hardest wood. These vignettes are first-person, succinct and uniformly powerful. The best of them, ``The Mickey Mantle Koan,'' considers the irony of a signed ball from Mantle arriving just after the death of his baseball fanatic brother. ``A Streetlamp in the Netherlands'' depicts a jarring collision between beauty and violence, when a woman on a moped hits an opening car door with her knee. Duncan calls these bits ``time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone.'' In these artful musings, Duncan reins in the didactics and presents readers with marvelous nuggets mined from a complex, absurd and magical life. (June)