Holding Pattern: Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen

The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve.

In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

227 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2008

About the author

Jeffery Renard Allen is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review. He has been a fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and Homeground: Language for an American Landscape.

Born in Chicago, Renard Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides teaching at Queens College (including, as of fall 2007, in the college’s new MFA program in creative writing), Allen is also an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. In addition, he is the director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, to be held in the summer of 2008. A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Reviews

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 4 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEW: Three Hatches. Single moms. Copper pennies.

[Lauren]

I tried to finish this but I had to protect my brain so I stopped a couple of pages into the chapter Holding Patterns. I was determined to continue but the next chapter was more of the same. A gifted writer who has not realized his gift.

[Stop]

Read the STOP SMILING review of Holding Pattern:

The stories in Jeffery Renard Allen’s new collection, a followup to his acclaimed debut novel, Rails Under My Back, are self-contained units, proceeding in accordance with their own inimitable logic. Some establish captivating worlds haunted by the specters of poverty and delinquency, while others tailspin and end abruptly, without explanation or resolution. As with the world he describes, Renard Allen’s characters and plotlines frequently implode and fall apart. In “Bread and the Land,” the tension between two characters comes to a head only when they literally run into each other. In “Dog Tags,” the story ends with a deus ex machina in the form of a monkey. Holding Pattern is an amorphous series of experiments with form, voice, and allegory, that veer from excitingly inventive to frustratingly portentous. Renard Allen’s seriousness is Holding Pattern’s greatest asset and its greatest failing.

Read the review...

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in Holding Pattern, zeroed in on the lives of African-Americans in Chicago-like brick city, can be enjoyed simply for their lyrical beauty and rich humanity. But for readers who follow closer and probe deeper there are even greater rewards. The key to the cipher is in the title itself: for each story Jeffery Renard Allen fashions a delicate patchwork of leitmotifs and allusions, leaving clues to moments of strange and sudden transcendence in otherwise naturalistic writing. Often breaking with reality, these shifts occur by way of Allen’s own invented logic and may invite comparisons to Garcia Marquez. But to me these touches of magical realism are just one of the author's many devices –- a way to highlight the brutal colloquialism of the inner-city experience. The compositional rigor with which the real and the spiritual are carefully balanced is therefore less Marquez and perhaps more I.B. Singer. In the end, each story feels like a small awakening. I enjoyed Holding Pattern immensely and can’t wait to read Allen’s new novel, Song of the Shank.

[Despina Panagakos Yeargin · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I underlined a few sentences for their beauty and perspective; while this book came recommended by a learned friend, I just didn't get it.

For those who DO get surreal or who DO enjoy Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this will be right up your [reading:] alley. My alley leads to other books, but don't let me steer you away. This book comes highly recommended by established and well-regarded writers. I had to let go and finish "trying to get it" 3 stories shy of finishing.

Allen has a good eye for the world around him, and I found some of his characters and situations fun, LOL funny and sometimes quite sad, but in the end, I just couldn't understand.

Anyone want to give it a try? I'm ready to offer my copy of the book for adoption.

http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/

[Drew McCutchen]

This is a beautiful, bewildering collection of stories. Allen's language is so poetic these sentences ache with their own density. I want to know what these stories are about, and I keep thinking about them two weeks later. But I'm also happy to be left in awe, wondering what about that character, that story, that twist, rattling around in my skull like a loose ball bearing.


“Blunt gave him a fierce cold look, eyelashes so stiff with mascara, they resembled tiny claws.” (Bread and the Land)

“In the green valley below, grass ducks under bladed wind, and trees are naked for all to see, their skinny arms pointing in jumbled directions. The mountain curves up from the valley in a range of stony ridges like knuckles and joints, a peach fuzz of morning light growing from them. Up ahead, the engine disappears into a tunnel, followed by one car, then another. A steady rush of squeezing darkness.” (Dog Tags)

“Shiheed, he one funny-lookin motherfucker. Long square bread-loaf head. Eyes all slanted like bird wings. Low eyes, low, almost sitton on his nose. Nostrils big enough to drive two Mack trucks thorugh, cargo and all. Boogers big as peanuts. And these big white wide bright teeth like bars of soap.” (Holding Pattern)

“The police superintendent raised his eyes from the file and saw menace, tall and bony, standing in his office. If he was surprised that someone had been watching him—and who knew for long—he did not let on.” (The Near Remote)