Spit Baths by Greg Downs

From the Publisher

With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear.

The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Louisiana, Huey P. Long—on the day after Long's assassination. In "Hope Chests," a history teacher marries his student and takes her away from a place she hated, only to find that neither one of them can fully leave it behind. An elderly man in "Snack Cakes" enlists his grandson to help distribute his belongings among his many ex-wives, living and dead. In the title story, another intergenerational family tale, a young boy is caught in a feud between his mother and grandmother. The older woman uses the language of baseball to convey her view of religion and nobility to her grandson before the boy's mother takes him away, maybe forever.

Caught up in pasts both personal and epic, Downs's characters struggle to maintain their peculiar, grounded manners in an increasingly detached world.

Publishers Weekly

Examining the nooks and crannies of contemporary backwater life in the South and Midwest, Downs's debut collection opens with a kaleidoscopic description of an extended family breaking apart that is as disorienting as it is beautiful. "Black Pork" follows a white minor league pitcher back to the former sharecropper's shack he shares with his dementia-plagued grandfather, and manages to be simultaneously excruciating and deeply insightful about race as it centers on the two men's relationship with the black single mother and daughter across the lane. In "Ain't I a King, Too?" (set in 1935) a man about to leave his family finds himself abducted when he is mistaken for the then just assassinated Huey P. Long, the corrupt former governor of Louisiana. "Freedom Rider" turns similarly odd when a school trip turns into a physical free-for-all among the adolescent participants. Even more darkly, in "A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs," a middle-aged man considers the frailties of his own marriage after observing a colleague eyeing a group of the colleague's wife's students. A strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material allow Downs to take the kinds of risks in tone and subject that make his debut a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A series of 13 punchy, white-trashy takes on displacement and youthful perplexity. The first, "Adam's Curse," is a mere two pages long, and demonstrates nicely the strange beauty of Downs's imagination. The 19-year-old college-dropout narrator recounts blandly the decision by his female relatives to live without men-"they simply exhaled the men like sighs from their houses." The narrator, who lives in the basement of his aunt's house, observes both sides of the sexual divide, all the while simply aching to hop in the car of the willing Kroger checkout girl and take a ride with her. The narrator of "Snack Cakes," as in many of the stories, is a high-school boy on the cusp of manhood, trying to navigate the dysfunctional trajectories of various family members-in this case, a grandfather who married six times still can't quite decide which wife he loves best. In the title story, the boy's mother has left him for a month in the care of his grandmother, Maw-Maw, in Joelton, Ky., in order to find an apartment and new life for them in Springfield, Mo. The boy, Crawford, isn't sure what to think: "Every day your mother wakes up and says it's a new day," Maw-Maw tells him skeptically. "But the truth is there aren't any new days." "Field Trip" fuses a young man's sexual daydreams into a schoolbus outing, while "Freedom Rides" pursues a soured middle-school trip through civil-rights history. Perhaps the most ambitious and compelling story here is "Ain't I a King, Too?," involving the identity crisis of a middle-aged loner fleeing domestic tribulation back in Kentucky in 1935, who arrives in Shreveport, La., only to be mistaken for the recently deceased senator, Huey Long. Downs, winner of theFlannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, is a writer to watch. His work has a cerebral, surreal element that requires a little piecing together.

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