Great American Desert: Stories

by Terese Svoboda

Water, its use and abuse, trickles through  Great American Desert , a story collection by Terese Svoboda that spans the misadventures of the prehistoric Clovis people to the wanderings of a forlorn couple around a pink pyramid in a sci-fi prairie. In “Dutch Joe,” the eponymous hero sees the future from the bottom of a well in the Sandhills, while a woman tries to drag her sister back from insanity in “Dirty Thirties.” In “Bomb Jockey,” a local Romeo disposes of leaky bombs at South Dakota’s army depot, while a family quarrels in “Ogallala Aquifer” as a thousand trucks dump chemical waste from a munitions depot next to their land. Bugs and drugs are devoured in “Alfalfa,” a disc jockey talks her way out of a knifing in “Sally Rides,” and an updated Pied Piper begs parents to reconsider in “The Mountain.” The consequences of the land’s mistreatment is epitomized in the final story by a discovery inside a pink pyramid.
 
In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda’s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us—and what it can do to us.
 

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2019

About the author

Terese Svoboda has published 19 books of fiction, poetry, memoir and biography. Svoboda's writing has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, BOMB, Columbia, Yale Review, and the Paris Review. She lives in New York.

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terese Svoboda's Great American Desert is a marvelous prose object, whose stories cohere into a novel where landscape serves as both protagonist and overarching metaphor. And there's so much music in this book—just read this sentence aloud and see if you aren't singing: "Autumn falls on all of them, its tumbleweeds, its wetter weather, its dark, then winter arrives anyway."

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The span of short stories, from the prehistoric to the sci-fi future, all centre on the one piece of land, the great American desert, which endures through all our short lifetimes. Bomb Jockey and Ogallala Aquifer are grounded in recent history, though I didn't know it until I looked them up. Poignantly and compassionately told. Also a warning about the damage we are doing to the land on which we depend.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly crafted stories that explore the use and abuse of the land in America's heartland from the Clovis people some 10,000 years ago to the [near?] future wasteland it will become and also sneakily expose tricky family dynamics over the centuries (millennia).

[Lynee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tried to get into this book, but just didn't succeed.

[Nina Shevchuk-Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terese Svoboda's stories in this book interpret the relationship we have with that which is already here. For her characters, what is given—what they have come and think they understand—is the Great Plains, a space that is misleading with its openness. One thinks one can see “it” coming for miles, whatever “it” is, but the residents and travelers of the Plains continue to be ignorant—willfully sometimes—of what the land obscures.

In “Dutch Joe,” the land hides water, and it take a man with the experience that came before his coming to the New World—the skill acquired in the Dutch Low Lands building dikes—to find the water. In “Bomb Jockey,” the unseen war demands the manufacture of bombs in distant factories, and the surplus and defective weaponry then must be stored—hidden—under ground where it can invisibly leak poison while the locals’ gaze glides over the neat subdivisions of the town that the depot supports.

Svoboda’s characters contend with people who came before them: daughters with fathers, grandchildren with grandfathers, high-schoolers with college drop-outs. There is always someone there to blow the seeds into your face. Someone to obscure the vision. There is always something that manages to be not-there: pollution that is not believed in, menace that can be tied in conversation, meanness in the expectations of filial duty.

Read the full review at http://bit.ly/2Foguxr

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good variety of western landscapes and situations. The end was a bit bleak, which was ok. Fables, history, etc.