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Knuckleheads
At heart, these stories explore generational intersections, with teenagers confronting the moments that will foment their directions to adulthood, and adults searching out opportunities for change in their present lives, gazing back on their own defining experiences in order to help chart new courses. Jeff Kass is a teacher of English and creative writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, MI, and works as the Poet-in-Residence for Ann Arbor Public Schools. Jeff directs the creative writing program at Ann Arbor's Teen Center, The Neutral Zone, where he founded and continues to direct The VOLUME Youth Poetry Project.
- GenresShort Stories
250 pages, Paperback
First published March 22, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 1, 2012
**Parts of this review were originally published in American Book Review.**
Jeff Kass has packed a ton of literary meat and wit in his articulate collection of short stories, Knuckleheads, released in April 2011 by Dzanc Books. It’s filled with charming tales which ping-pong between adolescence and adulthood; shattered dreams, immature dick-swinging contests, unbridled testosterone, stolen Pop Tarts, middle-aged dick-swinging contests, and the ever universal sexual frustration.
Kass opens his collection with a story titled “Don’t Mess,” which provides a glimpse into the life of a teen wrestler, a seed, and the grittiness of cutthroat competition dusted with an essence of Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. Kass paints a painfully vivid picture of the rivalries, peer pressure, duress to perform, requirements to slim down all in the name of the sport. In one encapsulating passage, he writes, “Tough enough too to be named top seed at 138 lbs. in the Peru Tournament in Plattsburgh, a cold farmtown with a locker room so cold we could see our breath when we stripped to our boxers and weighed in on an enormous cattle scale. We were a handful of miles from the Canadian border and we were freezing. We wanted to hurt people and get back on the bus and get the fuck home.”
In a separate story titled “Scramble,” Kass toasts to being young and impressionable in a manner that recalls Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned: “I looked like a potato an angry infant had jabbed toothpicks into for arms and legs…Horrible qualities for anybody, but excruciating for a kid so consistently horny, he walked around with a boner three or four times each hour. I had nowhere to put that boner, no idea at all what to do with it, and its nagging presence distracted and embarrassed me.” In this story and more, Kass brings such hormonal misfortunes back, all too well. Sometimes, I forget how hard it is to be a kid.
Hands-down my favorite story is “Parent-Teacher Conference,” which depicts forgotten conflict merging with new conflict, or vice versa. It’s a tale about a childhood nemesis who once bashed in the narrator’s head with a baseball. Flash to adulthood where the misbehaviors of this nemesis’ offspring thrusts the two of them into a passive-aggressive reunion: “The problem’s that he sports the same smirk you did on the pitcher’s mound. The problem’s that on hot afternoons when I’m walking across baseball fields, the left side of my head still throbs. The problem is I lost my lucky bat, turned to wrestling, and years later wanted your son to try and punch me so I could kill him.”
Initially, I was under the impression that Kass’s narrator, in the position of power as the teacher, is nothing more than an arrogant SOB, but the progressive passages drip with earnest depictions of warranted resentment, “A batter knows the ball is headed to his face when it never shrinks, when it appears to keep growing until a massive blur slams his skull. That’s what I remember most, the spherical avalanche overwhelming my entire sense of sight just before the smack.” It was then that I realized maybe being an SOB is a part of being human, at least in Kass’s fictional universe, and I didn’t see this protagonist as an asshole anymore. If anything, he is hopelessly seeking redemption for his failures in the dead end motivations of an obnoxious adolescent. I sensed this in not only Kass’ narrative voice, but also in his strengths as a storyteller. It’s one thing to outline the details of going from point A and point B. Kass breaches the systematic approach to writing and emerges with a contemporary voice unique to the mainstream scene, evoking conflict and emotion through raw internal monologue.
Overall, I sensed a bit of everything in Kass’ writing. At times, there were Murakami dream-like phrases, “Girls who floated through the stench and chill of the gym like an alien fog, mystics in saddle-shoes,” which, fueled by teenage volatility, would instantaneously morph into pubescent ’roid-like rage: “When that whistle blew, I flew at the fourth seed like a rabid raccoon. Sucked his leg to my chest as if I were prepared to eat it for dinner, tripped his other leg and plummeted him onto his back. Maybe I bashed my face into his knee. I don’t know what I felt. My mouth stung and there was ripped skin and blood and I swallowed some but I kept surging.” And there were honest depictions of martial tensions outlined in “Drowning Superman”: “Waiting too long for a forty-two dollar lobster and its microwaved potato companion is not the same thing as waiting for sex. The build-up, the anticipation of peeling somebody’s thong off, of watching a pair of nipples tune in like a radio signal – when these things come to fruition, the irritation of the previous delay can evaporate. Not so with food that when it arrives tastes only slightly more appetizing than truck tires.”
These stories shouldn’t be read, but like life, be experienced. This book is a ride I wish I could get on again with virgin knowledge of its twists and turns, but I can’t, so the best thing I can do is reflect on it, and suggest its brilliance to all.
Jeff Kass has packed a ton of literary meat and wit in his articulate collection of short stories, Knuckleheads, released in April 2011 by Dzanc Books. It’s filled with charming tales which ping-pong between adolescence and adulthood; shattered dreams, immature dick-swinging contests, unbridled testosterone, stolen Pop Tarts, middle-aged dick-swinging contests, and the ever universal sexual frustration.
Kass opens his collection with a story titled “Don’t Mess,” which provides a glimpse into the life of a teen wrestler, a seed, and the grittiness of cutthroat competition dusted with an essence of Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. Kass paints a painfully vivid picture of the rivalries, peer pressure, duress to perform, requirements to slim down all in the name of the sport. In one encapsulating passage, he writes, “Tough enough too to be named top seed at 138 lbs. in the Peru Tournament in Plattsburgh, a cold farmtown with a locker room so cold we could see our breath when we stripped to our boxers and weighed in on an enormous cattle scale. We were a handful of miles from the Canadian border and we were freezing. We wanted to hurt people and get back on the bus and get the fuck home.”
In a separate story titled “Scramble,” Kass toasts to being young and impressionable in a manner that recalls Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned: “I looked like a potato an angry infant had jabbed toothpicks into for arms and legs…Horrible qualities for anybody, but excruciating for a kid so consistently horny, he walked around with a boner three or four times each hour. I had nowhere to put that boner, no idea at all what to do with it, and its nagging presence distracted and embarrassed me.” In this story and more, Kass brings such hormonal misfortunes back, all too well. Sometimes, I forget how hard it is to be a kid.
Hands-down my favorite story is “Parent-Teacher Conference,” which depicts forgotten conflict merging with new conflict, or vice versa. It’s a tale about a childhood nemesis who once bashed in the narrator’s head with a baseball. Flash to adulthood where the misbehaviors of this nemesis’ offspring thrusts the two of them into a passive-aggressive reunion: “The problem’s that he sports the same smirk you did on the pitcher’s mound. The problem’s that on hot afternoons when I’m walking across baseball fields, the left side of my head still throbs. The problem is I lost my lucky bat, turned to wrestling, and years later wanted your son to try and punch me so I could kill him.”
Initially, I was under the impression that Kass’s narrator, in the position of power as the teacher, is nothing more than an arrogant SOB, but the progressive passages drip with earnest depictions of warranted resentment, “A batter knows the ball is headed to his face when it never shrinks, when it appears to keep growing until a massive blur slams his skull. That’s what I remember most, the spherical avalanche overwhelming my entire sense of sight just before the smack.” It was then that I realized maybe being an SOB is a part of being human, at least in Kass’s fictional universe, and I didn’t see this protagonist as an asshole anymore. If anything, he is hopelessly seeking redemption for his failures in the dead end motivations of an obnoxious adolescent. I sensed this in not only Kass’ narrative voice, but also in his strengths as a storyteller. It’s one thing to outline the details of going from point A and point B. Kass breaches the systematic approach to writing and emerges with a contemporary voice unique to the mainstream scene, evoking conflict and emotion through raw internal monologue.
Overall, I sensed a bit of everything in Kass’ writing. At times, there were Murakami dream-like phrases, “Girls who floated through the stench and chill of the gym like an alien fog, mystics in saddle-shoes,” which, fueled by teenage volatility, would instantaneously morph into pubescent ’roid-like rage: “When that whistle blew, I flew at the fourth seed like a rabid raccoon. Sucked his leg to my chest as if I were prepared to eat it for dinner, tripped his other leg and plummeted him onto his back. Maybe I bashed my face into his knee. I don’t know what I felt. My mouth stung and there was ripped skin and blood and I swallowed some but I kept surging.” And there were honest depictions of martial tensions outlined in “Drowning Superman”: “Waiting too long for a forty-two dollar lobster and its microwaved potato companion is not the same thing as waiting for sex. The build-up, the anticipation of peeling somebody’s thong off, of watching a pair of nipples tune in like a radio signal – when these things come to fruition, the irritation of the previous delay can evaporate. Not so with food that when it arrives tastes only slightly more appetizing than truck tires.”
These stories shouldn’t be read, but like life, be experienced. This book is a ride I wish I could get on again with virgin knowledge of its twists and turns, but I can’t, so the best thing I can do is reflect on it, and suggest its brilliance to all.
November 12, 2012
hilarious and realist look at boys, boys in psorts, boys on playgrounds, boys in basements, boys in classrooms, boys in adulthood, boys on golf courses, but from these seemingly simple troupes comes surprisingly touching truisms and broken dreams.
May 24, 2011
The ten short stories that make up Jeff Kass's debut collection prove there's plenty of life left in the coming-of-age genre yet. Kass's approach to the topic is refreshingly different: in these tales, for the most part, the play on sports teams and end up getting the girls. There is not so much of the overt nihilism of those chronicled in, say, James Franco's 'Palo Alto'. Which is not to say Kass's characters necessarily enjoy happy high school days. They're afflicted by just the same insecurities and hang-ups, only they come equipped with the muscles to help them fix stuff. Kass is an incredibly kinetic writer and the stories zip by. The best, arguably, is the collection of fractured vignettes which make up 'Basements' - so good they leave you aching for more. If there is a criticism, it's that some of the stories revolving around the grown-up 'Knuckleheads' maybe don't work so well: it's easy to sympathise with a teenage wrestler going through adolescent angst; less so with a fortysomething who was dealt all the right cards but still feels a little too sorry for himself. Nevertheless, an excellent collection. Read it along with Frey's Palo Alto, and get the view from both sides.
(It must also be said, credit to Dzanc Books for buying in big-time to the e-book revolution: their e-books are half the price of print copies, which puts most big publishers to shame. Dzanc (and other relatively smaller, independent publishers like Featherproof) have taken a head-start the others - who seem almost to be in denial about the whole e-book thing -will soon regret).
(It must also be said, credit to Dzanc Books for buying in big-time to the e-book revolution: their e-books are half the price of print copies, which puts most big publishers to shame. Dzanc (and other relatively smaller, independent publishers like Featherproof) have taken a head-start the others - who seem almost to be in denial about the whole e-book thing -will soon regret).
December 7, 2011
Knuckleheads knocked me out. It's full of finely observed stories with tremendously assured first-person voices. Many of these stories share common elements: characters in or looking back on high school sports careers, on one side of the bully/bullied equation, with a heightened sense of body consciousness -- the collection is well-titled. But the similarities don't feel limiting or constricting, because the individual stories are so strong (it also doesn't hurt that several break the mold). A story (in part) about a golf tournament held me riveted, no small feat. And I'm actively impatient to read more fiction from Kass.
December 8, 2013
Funny, quick and very askew. Short story collection about men and the silly things they do. I've you've got one in your life, give them this book. They'll thank you, in between long, deep chuckles.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews