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The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot
Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll’s stories, "The guy can really write." And in The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan’s northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal. The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll’s range and understanding of human nature, and to how "the heart in conflict with itself" always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend’s mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order — a voice as original as the stories he tells. Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll’s skill and insight on display in this unique collection.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
176 pages, Paperback
Published April 3, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 17, 2017
via my blog https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
she insisted nobody ever won: “Nobody, Sam. Remember that. Above all else, remember that when the fairyland dream smoke clears, women like us, like you and me, we always, every single solitary time, wake up elsewhere. And that other life we wanted so badly? The one back there? It’s nothing more than a mirage, the simple-sad story of our botched and misguided lives.”
The writing in this collection of stories is wonderful, the characters are raw, some stuck in their hopeless lives and old enough to know it’s not going to get better, others are scratching to escape households where their parents are miserable with the struggle of staying afloat, some still altered after being burned by love physically, bottom dwellers and those just ‘knocking around’. The children are just as perceptive and believable as the grown ups, maybe a little criminal but for good purposes.
Young boys ‘speak with bigger words ‘ than their mother’s loser boyfriends, those ‘stand ins’ they’re stuck with until the real father’s might possibly return, women remember their vanishing youth and wonder at the turns life takes-this is full of human reflection. Some mother’s look for and clip miracles. while the child laughs behind her back. A fourteen year old boy finds in his mother’s friend a mermaid like soul as she shares an intimate moment with him on the water. People are let down, so many try but just can’t be good, just can’t shake the misery induced by a life that isn’t turning out right. Some homes are alive with quiet violence. “I hated how every conversation took on the urgency of a hurricane or tornado drill, and all I really wanted was to get as far away from the dangers of that house as quickly as I could.” There are big moments and small moments we carry with us. The reader climbs inside so many character’s minds that they are dizzy with emotions: their hatreds, loves, regrets, hopes -all of it. Heavy stuff.
This collection is from the Made In Michigan Series, set in Michigan. The author is very perceptive, the characters are birthed fully in his imagination but feel like real people. Like all of us, in spite of their struggles they still cling to hope, and their fictional lives live parallel to our own in a strange manner. I have to read his other books, not every writer can capture the essence of people in sentences.
Available Now
Wayne University Press
she insisted nobody ever won: “Nobody, Sam. Remember that. Above all else, remember that when the fairyland dream smoke clears, women like us, like you and me, we always, every single solitary time, wake up elsewhere. And that other life we wanted so badly? The one back there? It’s nothing more than a mirage, the simple-sad story of our botched and misguided lives.”
The writing in this collection of stories is wonderful, the characters are raw, some stuck in their hopeless lives and old enough to know it’s not going to get better, others are scratching to escape households where their parents are miserable with the struggle of staying afloat, some still altered after being burned by love physically, bottom dwellers and those just ‘knocking around’. The children are just as perceptive and believable as the grown ups, maybe a little criminal but for good purposes.
Young boys ‘speak with bigger words ‘ than their mother’s loser boyfriends, those ‘stand ins’ they’re stuck with until the real father’s might possibly return, women remember their vanishing youth and wonder at the turns life takes-this is full of human reflection. Some mother’s look for and clip miracles. while the child laughs behind her back. A fourteen year old boy finds in his mother’s friend a mermaid like soul as she shares an intimate moment with him on the water. People are let down, so many try but just can’t be good, just can’t shake the misery induced by a life that isn’t turning out right. Some homes are alive with quiet violence. “I hated how every conversation took on the urgency of a hurricane or tornado drill, and all I really wanted was to get as far away from the dangers of that house as quickly as I could.” There are big moments and small moments we carry with us. The reader climbs inside so many character’s minds that they are dizzy with emotions: their hatreds, loves, regrets, hopes -all of it. Heavy stuff.
This collection is from the Made In Michigan Series, set in Michigan. The author is very perceptive, the characters are birthed fully in his imagination but feel like real people. Like all of us, in spite of their struggles they still cling to hope, and their fictional lives live parallel to our own in a strange manner. I have to read his other books, not every writer can capture the essence of people in sentences.
Available Now
Wayne University Press
October 5, 2017
All the Way to Wonderful
Jack Driscoll’s moving stories in The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot consider Michigan as a continent on the shore of a universe. Through the speech and dreams of family members, he drives us to unmapped places where father figures disappear. He drags the lake for the lost among us. This is close writing—we learn what’s on the radio the moment love disintegrates (or discovers itself through courage and humor), and we know who’s sitting in the back seat. Cars, lakes, and stars: One story in this striking collection sneaks us into a deserted A-frame at night, another portal. I knew the A-frame would follow me in my dreams, but I’m glad I went inside. All the way to wonderful.
Jack Driscoll’s moving stories in The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot consider Michigan as a continent on the shore of a universe. Through the speech and dreams of family members, he drives us to unmapped places where father figures disappear. He drags the lake for the lost among us. This is close writing—we learn what’s on the radio the moment love disintegrates (or discovers itself through courage and humor), and we know who’s sitting in the back seat. Cars, lakes, and stars: One story in this striking collection sneaks us into a deserted A-frame at night, another portal. I knew the A-frame would follow me in my dreams, but I’m glad I went inside. All the way to wonderful.
August 25, 2022
I read this for two reasons: because I live in Michigan and will therefore read anything set in that fine (except when it's not) state, and because it was published on the Wayne State University Press and Wayne is my alma mater. Driscoll's most famous acolyte has got to be the late Elmore Leonard (another Michigander!), whose beyond-the-grave endorsement, "the guy can write," appears on this book. At a sentence level, he's right. Driscoll's sentences are spare and carefully worded, and they lend even the weaker stories here more power than they would otherwise; while I definitely see Driscoll on the Carver continuum, I think he's a better writer of prose. Yet he also shares Carver's main weakness, which is to say his stories all blend together by the end of the collection... teenagers from Northern Michigan (a brutal environment, especially in the winter - makes me glad I live around Detroit) drink and steal and get bad grades and try and fail to have sex and realize at the end that their bitter down-on-his-luck dad/stepdad loved them all along. Which is fine for one story, but begins to feel a little formulaic, a little maybe insubstantial, by the time the tenth closes off.
Props to "On This Day You Are All Your Ages," a real whirlwind of a story, and "All the Time in the World," the most affecting of the dad stories.
Props to "On This Day You Are All Your Ages," a real whirlwind of a story, and "All the Time in the World," the most affecting of the dad stories.
March 2, 2022
For me, these ten stories set in Michigan acted as slick spyholes into the lives of working class people anchored down by the weight of hard circumstances, yet still miraculously connected to a sense of what remains possible—in life, in relationships, or within themselves. Here are parents out of sync with their children and children disconnected from, or neglected by, their parents. Here, too: people who screw up often, generally endure (if for no other reason than because they see no alternative), and sometimes fight their way through life. Yet in every narrator, I found someone I somehow loved. And even in the badly behaving characters, I spied small reservoirs of light and hope that were revealed by circumstances and moments of inner or outer change. Jack's sentences are beautiful, and his insight into human nature extraordinary. I loved this collection of stories.
June 14, 2017
My review will soon appear in The Nervous Breakdown. Here is an excerpt of it:
Like all Driscoll’s stories, the ones in this brilliant new collection beg to be read aloud. This is one of the highest compliments I can pay to a work of prose—that its language is so rich, its rhythms so musical, its voice so dense that it deserves to be savored, word for word, like poetry. It is no surprise that Driscoll knows how to make words sing. He started his literary career as a poet, and several of his 11 books are collections of poetry.
On a recent hour-long drive I decided to introduce my family to Driscoll’s latest book by reading it aloud to them. I chose “This Story” first, the winner of the Pushcart Prize. It opens with Fritzi’s mother clipping articles about miracles and banking on one happening in their “nothing town,” hoping someone discovers “a visage of Christ in a lint screen at the local Laundromat.” But we later discover that a miracle is what Fritzi’s father will need, if he wants to get his sentence overturned from first-degree manslaughter to self-defense.
This story is a perfect illustration of Driscoll’s gifts. Fifteen-year-old Fritzi is “one-quarter Ottawa on [his] dad’s side” and his two friends from the reservation live somewhere so remote the best way to get around is by snowshoe or snowmobile.
How Fritzi describes his favorite pastime is pure poetry. He and his buddies smoke in a car called Fury, “up on blocks, transmission shot and hubs painted purple. Rear risers but no fires, and snow up to both doors so we have to crawl inside, like it’s an igloo or a fort, and always with some half-wrapped notion of someday firing it alive and driving hell-bent away.”
Fritzi is on a mission to scare Billy Bigelow away from his mother, which he envisions as a rescue maneuver, for her own good. He and his friends secretly stalk him on a snowmobile that leaves no tracks because they attached a “horsehair tail to the ass-end.” As they plot against Bobby, Fritzi remembers his father’s lessons to never back down. Never turn back. Man up.
But the author is a kind god, so he gives us hope for Fritzi at the end. He starts to see his father’s fate as a cautionary tale. “Like father, like son, and it takes only a matter of seconds for me to calculate that weeks or months or years from now I might own up that ‘Here, overtaken by rage and revenge, I where I pummeled and perhaps maimed or even killed a man.’” So he sneaks away, into the snow drifts, we hope, towards a future with more freedom, grace, and forgiveness.
Driscoll is known for his teaching as well as his writing, and “The Alchemist’s Apprentice” is dedicated to one of his most famous former students, Vince Gilligan, creator of the TV series “Breaking Bad.” How can you resist a story that begins with a line like this: “My mom says she hasn’t the foggiest and that wherever Jimmy Creedy, her stay-over boyfriend, heisted all those tracheotomy tubes is anybody’s guess.”
Even if, unlike me, you don’t relish reading aloud, I urge you to linger on every sentence, hearing the words in your head—their variations in speed and diction, their mix of epiphany and colorful analogy. The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot is filled with vivid characters and compelling plots, but, in the end, it’s the language that makes a Jack Driscoll story a Jack Driscoll story. Which, as many would agree, is the best kind of story there is.
Like all Driscoll’s stories, the ones in this brilliant new collection beg to be read aloud. This is one of the highest compliments I can pay to a work of prose—that its language is so rich, its rhythms so musical, its voice so dense that it deserves to be savored, word for word, like poetry. It is no surprise that Driscoll knows how to make words sing. He started his literary career as a poet, and several of his 11 books are collections of poetry.
On a recent hour-long drive I decided to introduce my family to Driscoll’s latest book by reading it aloud to them. I chose “This Story” first, the winner of the Pushcart Prize. It opens with Fritzi’s mother clipping articles about miracles and banking on one happening in their “nothing town,” hoping someone discovers “a visage of Christ in a lint screen at the local Laundromat.” But we later discover that a miracle is what Fritzi’s father will need, if he wants to get his sentence overturned from first-degree manslaughter to self-defense.
This story is a perfect illustration of Driscoll’s gifts. Fifteen-year-old Fritzi is “one-quarter Ottawa on [his] dad’s side” and his two friends from the reservation live somewhere so remote the best way to get around is by snowshoe or snowmobile.
How Fritzi describes his favorite pastime is pure poetry. He and his buddies smoke in a car called Fury, “up on blocks, transmission shot and hubs painted purple. Rear risers but no fires, and snow up to both doors so we have to crawl inside, like it’s an igloo or a fort, and always with some half-wrapped notion of someday firing it alive and driving hell-bent away.”
Fritzi is on a mission to scare Billy Bigelow away from his mother, which he envisions as a rescue maneuver, for her own good. He and his friends secretly stalk him on a snowmobile that leaves no tracks because they attached a “horsehair tail to the ass-end.” As they plot against Bobby, Fritzi remembers his father’s lessons to never back down. Never turn back. Man up.
But the author is a kind god, so he gives us hope for Fritzi at the end. He starts to see his father’s fate as a cautionary tale. “Like father, like son, and it takes only a matter of seconds for me to calculate that weeks or months or years from now I might own up that ‘Here, overtaken by rage and revenge, I where I pummeled and perhaps maimed or even killed a man.’” So he sneaks away, into the snow drifts, we hope, towards a future with more freedom, grace, and forgiveness.
Driscoll is known for his teaching as well as his writing, and “The Alchemist’s Apprentice” is dedicated to one of his most famous former students, Vince Gilligan, creator of the TV series “Breaking Bad.” How can you resist a story that begins with a line like this: “My mom says she hasn’t the foggiest and that wherever Jimmy Creedy, her stay-over boyfriend, heisted all those tracheotomy tubes is anybody’s guess.”
Even if, unlike me, you don’t relish reading aloud, I urge you to linger on every sentence, hearing the words in your head—their variations in speed and diction, their mix of epiphany and colorful analogy. The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot is filled with vivid characters and compelling plots, but, in the end, it’s the language that makes a Jack Driscoll story a Jack Driscoll story. Which, as many would agree, is the best kind of story there is.
February 5, 2020
These stories are like a series of landscape paintings. Scenes from lives that on the surface appear similar, but each have unique shadings and nuance. The tone is poetic, a rough kind of dreamy where the dreams have plenty of hard edges in the fog. Most are written with a teen point of view, but they all evoke images of change, life cycling through decay and renewal. I wished for them to be more distinct from each other.
Notes from each story:
The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot
A summer at the lake, a friend’s mom who struggles with boundaries, lake/cottage culture, and the passage of time.
All the Time in the World
A young woman this time (still a teen, though) whose mother has left, leaving Sam to deal in her own way. This includes shoplifting and underage drinking, so Sam is now on probation. Ruminations on how folks end up stuck in the hometown they wanted to escape - this part of this story includes an improbable but entertaining homemade guillotine.
Calcheck and Priest
Features two grown men - friends, brothers, doesn’t matter. And their love for each other and the one’s not-quite-stepchild. Manages to be both gritty and really sweet. Includes beautiful description of a coffin: “...hey, you got demons to keep at bay, you decide who or what you want standing guard at the gate.”
The Alchemist’s Apprentice
The flow and rhythm of this story was the most difficult to follow so far. Sentence structure and word order were very shifty. Another teen, a broken but not beaten mother, and a nomadic gentleman who offers some relief from their family griefs and tragedies.
Land of the Lost and Found
Pretty sure it’s wretched, not retched.
A quick story of bad luck turned good. Lots of childhood and family memories sprinkled throughout the collection.
The Good Father
Another teen, a father just out of prison. Bonding time at the dump. Hope for the future.
A Woman Gone Missing
A mother is losing her teenage daughter. The mother, who got pregnant as a teen, reminisces about that teen relationship, as well as the ones after. She thinks about her unstable childhood, full of fighting and crime. And she thinks about now, when her teen daughter has gone to live with her father.
Here’s How It Works
Two brothers, a single bar tending mom, a dangerous mine turned quarry. The brothers don’t know their dads - one struggles more with this and he is the one who can’t leave the quarry alone.
On This Day You Are All Your Ages
Wtf are drops for earwigs? In a pharmacy context? Otherwise, this might have been my favorite, looking at one woman - oldish, maybe 50s - across her whole life. Looking in flashes, in no particular order, referencing her mother as well as the men in her life.
That Story
“...but maybe all miracles are a matter of need and deceit...”
A teen’s father is in prison and his mother has taken up with a slimy Texan. The teen and two of his friends make ominous plans to dispose of the Texan, but find him with another woman, after which their plans fizzle and drift away.
Notes from each story:
The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot
A summer at the lake, a friend’s mom who struggles with boundaries, lake/cottage culture, and the passage of time.
All the Time in the World
A young woman this time (still a teen, though) whose mother has left, leaving Sam to deal in her own way. This includes shoplifting and underage drinking, so Sam is now on probation. Ruminations on how folks end up stuck in the hometown they wanted to escape - this part of this story includes an improbable but entertaining homemade guillotine.
Calcheck and Priest
Features two grown men - friends, brothers, doesn’t matter. And their love for each other and the one’s not-quite-stepchild. Manages to be both gritty and really sweet. Includes beautiful description of a coffin: “...hey, you got demons to keep at bay, you decide who or what you want standing guard at the gate.”
The Alchemist’s Apprentice
The flow and rhythm of this story was the most difficult to follow so far. Sentence structure and word order were very shifty. Another teen, a broken but not beaten mother, and a nomadic gentleman who offers some relief from their family griefs and tragedies.
Land of the Lost and Found
Pretty sure it’s wretched, not retched.
A quick story of bad luck turned good. Lots of childhood and family memories sprinkled throughout the collection.
The Good Father
Another teen, a father just out of prison. Bonding time at the dump. Hope for the future.
A Woman Gone Missing
A mother is losing her teenage daughter. The mother, who got pregnant as a teen, reminisces about that teen relationship, as well as the ones after. She thinks about her unstable childhood, full of fighting and crime. And she thinks about now, when her teen daughter has gone to live with her father.
Here’s How It Works
Two brothers, a single bar tending mom, a dangerous mine turned quarry. The brothers don’t know their dads - one struggles more with this and he is the one who can’t leave the quarry alone.
On This Day You Are All Your Ages
Wtf are drops for earwigs? In a pharmacy context? Otherwise, this might have been my favorite, looking at one woman - oldish, maybe 50s - across her whole life. Looking in flashes, in no particular order, referencing her mother as well as the men in her life.
That Story
“...but maybe all miracles are a matter of need and deceit...”
A teen’s father is in prison and his mother has taken up with a slimy Texan. The teen and two of his friends make ominous plans to dispose of the Texan, but find him with another woman, after which their plans fizzle and drift away.
July 7, 2018
I’m blessed to have Jack as my teacher, and I must admit I approached this short story collection thinking, “Let’s see if he practices what he preaches.” By the end of the first story, however, I was so drawn in that I wasn’t analyzing, simply experiencing. From a father with a hook arm to a mother burned purple in a fire, these are stories of teenagers’ relationships with their parents, and, although those parents are drifters, and abandoners, and sometimes just royal screw-ups, these are stories of hope, faith, and love, stories where a boy who has been let down and betrayed by his father time and time again can say, “‘Yes,’…still disoriented but otherwise unafraid. And believing, almost—and most of all—that in the final tally, no matter how crazy, or how long it sometimes takes, a good father always gets it right” (97). With prose that is somehow both stark and sweeping at the same time, Driscoll argues for the possibility of love and redemption in the bleakest of landscapes.
May 20, 2019
This author has won numerous awards for his stories. I, however, found they were entirely predictable - each had a similar theme - divorce, abandonment, prison. Also, his use of run-on and incomplete sentences made reading difficult to follow. His writing is vague, obscure, random and often required rereading multiple sentences to eliminate confusion. There were some vague references to living in Michigan, but not enough to get the feeling that he has actually ever been here.
July 23, 2017
Every story in this collection is a masterpiece of short-form prose. Each one makes an indelible image, packing a novel's worth of story on life on the margins of society in Northern Michigan into a meticulously detailed, compact family portrait. Wow!
May 18, 2018
A series of short stories based in Michigan. The landscape is described well, and I enjoy the vignettes of familiar places.
April 3, 2022
A refreshingly different collection of short stories. These stories are inhabited by characters who are down on their luck and often at the mercy of their emotions. Wonderfully raw and real.
February 13, 2020
Michigan stories. Well told.
Read
July 9, 2017As usual, Driscoll’s stories are those of heartbreak and compassion, his characters curiously quirky yet somehow all too familiar to us. He writes about human frailty, broken promises, the unknowableness of the human spirit—stories about the disconnect between ourselves and those we are closest to. Often the author explores the disconnect inherent in child/parent relationships, but we get this uncomfortable feeling that the distance might extend even to ourselves.
As “On This Day You are All Your Ages” suggests, Time seems counterintuitively nonlinear in the collection. We don’t so much evolve into new people as exist as unfortunate containers housing myriads of self-incarnations that haunt us all of our days.
Finally, Driscoll says, “Forgiveness is a test against anger and loss,” and it seems that by book’s end the reader must conclude it’s a toss-up whether the best of us can manage to pass it.
It’s a must-read.
As “On This Day You are All Your Ages” suggests, Time seems counterintuitively nonlinear in the collection. We don’t so much evolve into new people as exist as unfortunate containers housing myriads of self-incarnations that haunt us all of our days.
Finally, Driscoll says, “Forgiveness is a test against anger and loss,” and it seems that by book’s end the reader must conclude it’s a toss-up whether the best of us can manage to pass it.
It’s a must-read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews