What do you think?
Rate this book
Violence
In this shattering novel, a man walks into a convenience store--which turns out to be precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. The near-death and seemingly arbitrary survival of Charles Connally are rendered with a realism, horror, and compassion that explore the strands of brutality running invisibly through his life, his wife's--and perhaps, that of the entire nation. Author reading tour.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- GenresFiction
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
2 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Richard Bausch
92 books216 followersAn acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 15, 2021
A couple expecting a child (and at odds over whether they want to have a family) stays at a hotel on the outskirts of Chicago to visit the parents of the husband, Charles Connally. Connally (this name is used to refer to him throughout) heads out late at night to a convenience store and witnesses a multiple shooting during a holdup. Subsequent to the shooting, he struggles to regain his sense of self... in his words, loses his mind. The book is then about him starting to experience recovery, and the steps he needs to take to effect an end to his estrangement from his wife, Carol.
Naming a book “Violence” obviously leads to the reader “waiting around” for the violence to occur, and makes it easy for Bausch to drop various foreshadowing events (one involving the actual killers), but as the book progresses the book is more about how violence exerts its deleterious influence on relationships and society at various levels—intra-family abuse, spousal violence—and how people’s seeming need to forgive the violent in order to produce a tenuous sense of reconciliation or redemption helps propagate violence cross-generationally.
Some complaining about this book has come from those who find little to like about any of the characters, from the protagonist taking off on his wife and more or less quitting his life for several months, to the various other broken, failed people who occupy the novel’s pages. Carol, Connally’s wife, is probably the most overtly sympathetic character, although it may be because she evinces a weakness due to pregnancy-related sickness (almost losing her child) rather than weakness due to pathology (the need to kill, the need to experience abuse, and so forth). I’d, however, prefer to consider the characters as pretty accurate reflections of what exists. While many of us are not violent, many if not most of us have experienced some sort of violence, some of it life-changing. Most of us, I’d hypothesize, are failures of some sort or another. The depiction of Connally’s distancing of himself and violent fantasies match the experiences of many victims, as does the brain fog that occurs, the disordered thinking.
The book is not without flaws. Bausch’s handling of exposition in the opening fourth doesn’t seem to balance quite correctly with conversation and action; there are a couple of revelations related to Carol’s and Connally’s marriage and prior lives that should have been placed differently. Some parts of the last fourth are sort of dull. But, overall, a solid effort, with some riveting parts from the crime about 75 pages in to the last fourth of the book.
Naming a book “Violence” obviously leads to the reader “waiting around” for the violence to occur, and makes it easy for Bausch to drop various foreshadowing events (one involving the actual killers), but as the book progresses the book is more about how violence exerts its deleterious influence on relationships and society at various levels—intra-family abuse, spousal violence—and how people’s seeming need to forgive the violent in order to produce a tenuous sense of reconciliation or redemption helps propagate violence cross-generationally.
Some complaining about this book has come from those who find little to like about any of the characters, from the protagonist taking off on his wife and more or less quitting his life for several months, to the various other broken, failed people who occupy the novel’s pages. Carol, Connally’s wife, is probably the most overtly sympathetic character, although it may be because she evinces a weakness due to pregnancy-related sickness (almost losing her child) rather than weakness due to pathology (the need to kill, the need to experience abuse, and so forth). I’d, however, prefer to consider the characters as pretty accurate reflections of what exists. While many of us are not violent, many if not most of us have experienced some sort of violence, some of it life-changing. Most of us, I’d hypothesize, are failures of some sort or another. The depiction of Connally’s distancing of himself and violent fantasies match the experiences of many victims, as does the brain fog that occurs, the disordered thinking.
The book is not without flaws. Bausch’s handling of exposition in the opening fourth doesn’t seem to balance quite correctly with conversation and action; there are a couple of revelations related to Carol’s and Connally’s marriage and prior lives that should have been placed differently. Some parts of the last fourth are sort of dull. But, overall, a solid effort, with some riveting parts from the crime about 75 pages in to the last fourth of the book.
June 10, 2016
As with many things in life, perspective is always important. I picked this book up expecting some sort of suspense novel, and while there was always a sense of tension throughout at a high-wire level, this was more about psychology of violence than violence itself. One 15 or so page scene is the title basis, a random robbery gone wrong that the protagonist just happened to be present for and survive. However, the core of the book was how he got to that spot, with a rough childhood that he's not fully aware of, and much more how the action then impacted his mental state going forward. Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes, and as someone who has gone through an uncontrollable change to personality and state of mind due to a relatively common family trauma, I found myself drawn into the feelings of anxiety over the "I don't know" answer that came from the lead characters mouth frequently.
At one point, these words really cut through:
"He was perfectly aware that other people had been through the same, or worse. None of it had left much of a mark on him or caused him any trouble that he was aware of. He knew intellectually that this was only a construction of his mind, but it seemed to him that he had lived quite happily in a kind of sweet ignorance before he walked into the convenience store, and he could not explain how everything inside him - hoe and memory and the wish to be gentle - should feel so wholly different now, as though what had transpired in those terrible minutes in the middle of a night in Christmas week had somehow mixed in with it all, and altered the chemistry that was himself, emptying some poison into him.
He could not get out of the circle of his own thoughts."
The psychology of not just the main character Connolly, but his wife and both their mothers and how it all intertwined just kept things pulsing along. There are some dead spots early and at times it's a bit clunky, but definitely worth the time to get a great look at the type of impact early life trauma can then have later when something is triggered.
At one point, these words really cut through:
"He was perfectly aware that other people had been through the same, or worse. None of it had left much of a mark on him or caused him any trouble that he was aware of. He knew intellectually that this was only a construction of his mind, but it seemed to him that he had lived quite happily in a kind of sweet ignorance before he walked into the convenience store, and he could not explain how everything inside him - hoe and memory and the wish to be gentle - should feel so wholly different now, as though what had transpired in those terrible minutes in the middle of a night in Christmas week had somehow mixed in with it all, and altered the chemistry that was himself, emptying some poison into him.
He could not get out of the circle of his own thoughts."
The psychology of not just the main character Connolly, but his wife and both their mothers and how it all intertwined just kept things pulsing along. There are some dead spots early and at times it's a bit clunky, but definitely worth the time to get a great look at the type of impact early life trauma can then have later when something is triggered.
October 22, 2008
A powerful work. I won't soon shake it.
February 11, 2022
Bausch is such an artist with the English language that it makes up for this book's occasional minor missteps. Solid.
Read
June 23, 2013This book explores how violence - both domestic abuse and random violence - effects and changes victims. Really well done.
September 4, 2022
Ich habe die deutsche Übersetzung "Gewalt" gelesen; die war aber hier nicht auszuwählen.
Aus dem Klappentext: "In seinem spannenden Buch vollzieht der Autor mit größter psychologischer Einfühlung nach, bis in welche entlegenen Regionen die Gewalt in unserer gegenwärtigen Welt uns verfolgt, beeinflusst und verändert."
Das Buch ist zunächst sehr anstrengend zu lesen, weil es erst um eine Gewalttat und danach sehr ausführlich um die dysfunktionalen Beziehungen der Hauptfigur mit seiner Partnerin und seine Mutter geht, ohne jede Aussicht auf Entwicklung. All das erzeugt allerdings auch erst die Ausweglosigkeit, die sich dann im expliziten Höhepunkt am Ende des Buches in der Konfrontation niederschlägt. "Explizit" deswegen, weil man auf die Moral der Geschichte nicht selber kommen muss sondern sie einem in wörtlicher Rede dargelegt wird.
Aus dem Klappentext: "In seinem spannenden Buch vollzieht der Autor mit größter psychologischer Einfühlung nach, bis in welche entlegenen Regionen die Gewalt in unserer gegenwärtigen Welt uns verfolgt, beeinflusst und verändert."
Das Buch ist zunächst sehr anstrengend zu lesen, weil es erst um eine Gewalttat und danach sehr ausführlich um die dysfunktionalen Beziehungen der Hauptfigur mit seiner Partnerin und seine Mutter geht, ohne jede Aussicht auf Entwicklung. All das erzeugt allerdings auch erst die Ausweglosigkeit, die sich dann im expliziten Höhepunkt am Ende des Buches in der Konfrontation niederschlägt. "Explizit" deswegen, weil man auf die Moral der Geschichte nicht selber kommen muss sondern sie einem in wörtlicher Rede dargelegt wird.
June 9, 2010
This book sounded interesting. But after a while it seems like reading a bunch of people whining. I agree I have never experienced a traumatic sitution such as is written about in this book - maybe if I had (God Forbid) I would feel more positive about it.
October 6, 2009
Reg loaned me this silly book. i thought he had read it but he was really just passing this awful thing on. it wasn't THAT bad.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews