Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing

by Robin McLean

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.

Here you'll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You'll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you'll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.

Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O’Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, The United States Of America, Audiobook, Literature, Adult Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2022

About the author

Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst in Massachusetts. Her first short story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize. The collection was also a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012. McLean’s stories have appeared widely in such places as The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, The Western Humanities Review,The Carolina Quarterly, The Nashville Review, The Malahat Review, Gargoyle, The Common, and Copper Nickel, and others.

A figure skater first—having learned to skate and walk at the same time—McLean believes that crashing on ice prepared her for writing fiction. Besides writing, her careers and interests have been diverse: pushcart hotdog sales, lawyer and mediator, potter and tile maker, political activist, union grievance officer, sculptor, haunted corn maze manager as well as zombie trainer. She currently teaches at Clark University and divides her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, NH, and a 200-year-old farm in Sunderland, MA.

She grew up in Peoria, Illinois, one of four wild and inventive sisters, all who, like their mother, attended Mount Holyoke College.

Reviews

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uh, did I read the same stunning short story collection that you folks did? Because I'm completely puzzled by the hostile reviews here. McLean's prose is taut and muscular, reminiscent of Brad Watson at his finest. The atmosphere here feels Southern, similar to the rugged feel of Cormac McCarthy, but the gritty realism here is in an entirely different realm that seems outside most American writing and that is sometimes surreal (thinking faucets, et al.), but never hokey. The best stories are the title one and "Bust for Herr Hitler," a bold and haunting tale that follows a woman gradually dying and her relationships along the way. The only weak story in the bunch is "Cat," which was too short and undeveloped. For McLean has one of those voices that is built for longer work. On the strength of this amazing book, I picked up PITY THE BEAST as well. You fuckers here on Goodreads are really down on original voices sometimes. And as a guy who has no real stake in literary world drama anymore and who is a completely disinterested party, I'm telling you that Robin McLean is the real fucking deal. Jesus Christ, don't you folks know how to appreciate batshit originals anymore? For fuck's sake.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada

They aimed pistol fingers out the window at setbacks, at drunk Indians.

“I don’t give a shit about Mexicans,” she said. “But Injue Joe was here first.”

“We were stronger,” they said.

She stood with a spatula over the couch. Moose roast simmered in the Crock-pot.

Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing is a collection of stories by Robin McLean and published by the Sheffield-based but transatlantic indy press And Other Stories, pioneers of the subscription model in the UK:

We are an independent, not-for-profit publisher of innovative contemporary writing from around the world.
...
And Other Stories is readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers. While our books are distributed widely through bookshops, it’s our subscribers’ support that makes the books happen. We now have about 1,000 active subscribers in over 40 countries, receiving up to 6 books a year.

The stories themselves are set in the modern day, mostly the US or Canadian border, but all have a western / frontier type mentality. In many respects they question the frontier myth, or western myth, but in others they embrace it. Most of the characters seem to be racist or nationalistic, either overtly or implicitly via american exceptionalism. The author has said, talking about her female characters in particular:

In American culture, you’re not supposed to whine. You are to fight your way within it, and I think dialogue can be a kind of sparring. Maybe it’s also a place for me (via my characters) to work out my own ambivalence, both admiring the toughness of American culture while also being irritated and frustrated by some having to struggle way more than others. I don’t feel the female characters in these stories are victimized. They’re very tough and finding their way within the American problem, the culture of the celebrated Individualist, the Frontier Person, the Cowboy or Cowgirl, pulling up by bootstraps. How do you live on in this space?

Which is where I think I really struggled with the collection as this isn't a myth in which I'm invested at all, and further these weren't characters with whom I wanted to spend any time,

On the positive side, there is some wonderful, atmospheric writing as well (not in the following passage) some interesting intrusions of surrealism:

A glorious new day in the North. The spruce stood tall and straight around the dog lot, a clearing for the small cabin with the tiny porch, the piles of cordwood covered willy-nilly by plastic and sheet metal and rusty roofing, old cars dismantled between trees, snow machines turned over for track work, the parts lost years back, a caribou hide strung between branches, well past dry, cracking, doorframes for the future house leaning on trees, windows, sawhorses, empty barrels for catching water, barrels of dog food, barrels with bottles for shooting practice, trailers with broken hitches, piled with antique stoves and sinks with interlinking pipes, bundles of webbing in stacks of stacks. The Pass presided over all of it. The east glowed with a cold, bored sun. The dogs howled to wake the neighbors, but the neighbors were a mile off and would think their noise was just a bear.

This sense of unexplored frontiers and the smallness of mankind vs. nature also felt very 19th century, particularly in an era of human-created climate change and potential overpopulation (opposite demographic pressures in some countries notwithstanding), although of course climate change is more of a threat to our civilisation than the planet itself.

Ultimately both an impressive collection and one I personally strongly disliked. 1.5 stars.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read 3 stories in the bath: this is going to be a five star book!
...just brilliant, more, more...

I slowed down to one a day, and re-read ones from the day before. With this, her second collection,* Robin McLean has become my favourite American storyteller, along with Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. **

Some stories are straightforward (ish) if distinctive, immediate; others act on you like a drug you've forgotten you've taken. Time lapses, jumps forward, expands and collapses. People start acting strangely, malevolently. Weird things happen, in Pterodactyl the creature comes out of the sky and raises the hero up in its talons, floating above it all. Things - dinners, journeys, being robbed, periods of lust, tranquillity, regret - pile up around you (it does seem to happen to you) like several car crashes you pick your way out of. You look up from reading these stories surprised you are in the same room. Read them in bed and you'll wake up thinking about them. Yes please.

*the effect may be cumulative for I have read her first collection Reptile House (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) and her novel Pity the Beast (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ).

**Originally I put elbows aside the likes of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore - maybe too strong!

[Jon Zelazny · Rating 3 out of 5]

When James Ellroy released AMERICAN TABLOID, I thought it his grand summation, his final statement as a crime writer, and thereafter he'd have the confidence, freedom, and drive to apply his hard-edged style and attitude to whatever subject warmed his heart.

Well, it turned out crime was the only subject that warmed his heart, but had he indeed swung for the literary fences, Ms. McLean's stories give you some idea of where he might have landed.

Her lines and thoughts are all short and punchy, angular, and just a little bit off, like a Robert Quine guitar solo. Images, thoughts, dialogue may or may not relate to her vaguely noir-ish storylines, and if that sort of thing bothers you, hey, tough luck. You're either on the McLean bus or you're off.

And it is a ride to places you've never been, but the relentless strangeness eventually wore me out. Like Ellroy, McLean would probably sneer that only sentimental, middlebrow audiences expect relatable, compelling characters and stories that tie up in neat little bows. Which I guess makes this collection the perfect litmus test for determining just how fucking cool and tough you really are.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

And Other Stories submission longlisted for the inaugural U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize...

"...the guilty must pay or the world goes to pieces."

I like short stories, but I usually tire of reading a collection by a single author (I also don't like reading novels by the same author back-to-back for whatever that's worth). This most definitely did not happen with McLean's collection. Every story grabbed my attention and took me somewhere I wasn't quite expecting. A kind of edginess ties these stories together---it's in the tone and in the situations (poverty, war, domestic unrest). Like little windows into an America just barely being held together for some of these characters; some cursed by fate, some willing accomplices to their own plights. If it's one thing she reminded me: Sometimes it's only the dog(s) you can trust.
------------------------------------------------
My Longlist Rankings for the U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize
1) Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán
2) A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse
3) Moldy Strawberries: Stories by Caio Fernando Abreu
4) Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing by Robin McLean
5) God's Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu (Prize Winner)
6) The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
7) New Animal by Ella Baxter
8) Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce Padilla
9) Pollak's Arm by Hans von Trotha
10) New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza

[Chloe Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, creepy stories that twist and jerk in unexpected and unexplained directions. The stories often end suddenly. Don't expect anything to be neatly tidied up.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember the last time I was this riveted by a story collection. In the first entry, But for Herr Hitler, one of the characters refers to the Alaskan landscape as too wide for a camera - an image that stuck with me as an apt metaphor for McLean's work. The stories seem to exist outside the confines of McLean's lens, beginning before and continuing after the snapshot she gives us. There is often no denouement, no climax, no resolution. We are left unsettled. If that disregard for traditional story arc is a subtle tweak of the story form, McLean has bolder designs on the themes she covers. Most of the entries take place in the American West, a landscape that allows McLean to challenge and reinvent motifs that recur throughout American literature. In part she is demystifying the landscape, but more fundamentally she is depicting an America that is worn out and adrift, its mission spent. The frontier isn't new; it is dated and cliched. The characters no longer larger than life, even if their landscape remains so. It is a West that has reclaimed itself, no longer at the mercy of the stories of its inhabitants, but one that asserts itself over people who have lost their way. Perspective is restored. Many artists, working in a variety of mediums, seek to reinvent the American West, but McLean has a slightly different approach, fueled by a perspective that makes this feel edgy, characters out of focus or dangling on the precipice of apocalypse. If these were photographs, the images would be faded, washed out. People lost in poloroids taken a generation ago. Her prose is gorgeous too, precise yet otherworldly, often weaving dialogue with narration, brick by brick, as she builds her stories.

[sarah wertis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been in bed, feverish and delusional for the last five days. Naturally, I finished this kooky, morbid, and odd collection of stories as a way to pass the time. To be completely honest I don’t remember them super well, but I do remember them being quite strange. Probably would have been more poetic if my thoughts were coherent. (Read in one pair of sweatpants, sipping on pedialyte, knocking on deaths door)

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

McLean sketches these short stories with a light touch that uses more or less the same stylistic technique: provide a few crumbs to induce the reader to imagine likely tragic denouements and then go into an endless series of red herring detours mixing the past and imagined future for and by the principal character.

To this reader, the technique grew increasingly irritating rather than enjoyable. And ultimately left nothing novel or insightful to hang on to.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love these stories, who wouldn't want to love a collection called 'Get'em Young, Treat 'em Tough,m Tell 'em Nothing', but although the writing may be brilliant for me pyrotechnics of style and no message. Or maybe I am too old to see or understand the message. What was the eponymous story about? A soldier, an overseas posting, a withdrawal, but is this story saying something about American soldiers, the American army specifically, America military in general, or just soldiers, armies and military in general? Was it referencing Vietnam or Afghanistan? or both, or neither? Is it all a comment on poverty, opportunity or lack there of. Our soldiers of a regular army the same as those of a conscript army?

Any or none of these things may be relevant, but by the time I got to the penultimate story my mind was wandering after a tale, 'A House Full of Feasting', that was clearly symbolic, in fact it was replete symbolism, I think. But I found no understanding. Maybe the stories all wrapped up in America's frontiers and obsession with the 'West' and its myths archetypes, but for me it was a rabbit hole of intellectual posturing communicating its own cleverness and speaking in a void, to no one.

I read collections like this to discover writers I want to read more by. I didn't find it here. But there is a part of me wonders if it is my fault.

[James Marlowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

blistering

[Sarah Grace Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5ish

[Eliza Mood]

Robin McClean. Published by And Other Stories. Revenge is deep. Delusion deepens mercilessly slowly. So much is unspoken but for the terror of the throwaway line. The ordinary switches. Were signs there all along, waiting? In retrospect, tragedy may be a long time coming.

[Kamila Zakowicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need someone else to read this book so they can explain it to me.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the last of the inaugural longlist for the US and Canada Republic of Consciousness I had to read. I read it in audio, which makes it impossible to write summaries of the 10 short stories in the book. I thought all but one was very good - that one wasn't bad, just short, very short. I listened to it twice and it still escapes me. These stories are all set in rural America, very rural America where neighbors are not near but animals and roaring rivers are. It brought to mind American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, the book of short stories that caused me to create a "rural gothic" bookshelf. These stories are gritty. There's a focus on nature, as well as on the human characters. Many of the characters are men who can't survive in a 9-5 world. The women seem to do a bit better. The characters like their guns and most dislike anyone who is not like them, i.e., is not white and male. Many have a survivalist mentality. Some are veterans. In a couple of stories, there is a sense of community among the far-flung neighbors. The writing is excellent, conveying a real sense of place.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, and I’m generally not a big fan of short stories. The relationship this author has with words is beautiful… do write pieces so original and unique using language that is truly enjoyable to read is a true gift. Now, I have to admit I didnt fully ‘get’ each of these stories, but the pieces that held on in my mind as I read them each in some way pointed out (subtly as well as quite blatantly in other parts), the absurdity and contradictions in life. Enjoying life to the full, yet abducted; taking snapshots and thinking of the upcoming instagram or facebook post, missing the kidnapping and theft one is a victim of; the dedication and commitment of a soldier to a completely pointless military endeavor….I loved how the irony of these settings was played out with a bit of absurdity. I will have to read these again! Take your time and THINK while reading this work.

[Chris Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think, essentially, this sort of ironic, detached, wry short story is just not designed to be something for me to enjoy. It feels like I’m seeing a writer perform some sort of ritual with the trappings of a narrative, but I’m meant to be something in that ritual that just isn’t there. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I am saying - almost as a warning for me for the future - that reading this sort of thing almost never works well for me. There’s no sense of a narrative or characters that have been built up, just stuff happening with no emotional resonance at all for me

[Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook. Not my cup of tea.. did not care about any of the characters.

Some of the dialogue and prose was very well done, but the stories and characters within them were uninteresting. I’m no english major and fairly inelegant when it comes to books/audiobooks I enjoy, but for me, it seemed like the author focused more on the beauty of each sentence than any connection to the reader.

[Bryn Lerud · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a couple of stories that stand out here. The one about the corporate guy who is hanging onto a scrap of a tree after falling off a cliff. He's thinking about his life, about why he was out here hiking in the middle of nowhere where noone can find him. He can see the river far below and the bridge crossing it and makes up stories about the people crossing the bridge.

[James Kinsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't fault the quality at all, or the variety. Some stories I took to more than others (True Carnivores is worth the price of admission alone) but that's anthologies for you. I'd happily seek out more of McLean's work on the strength of this.

[Bella Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best I’ve read all year. Punchy and delicate and dark and delicious. Sentences that blow ur brains out. I don’t know where McLean has been or why I haven’t happened upon her before but now that I have I can’t get enough.

[José Pereira · Rating 4 out of 5]

McLean is a newfangled, unruly writer; promising.
The prose is wonderfully clean and unpretentious yet shot-through with truly original turns of phrase and images. McLean needs little to create magic, tension, and unease; she’s a pro at withholding, at keeping the reader out of step.
Meaning is often hard to grasp. And despite this being intentional - McLean is mostly going for the feeling, the immediate experience - , the opaqueness can be frustrating.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sentences, they are wild.

[Jesse Claflin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of stories of people and their imaginations running wild on the frontier. Some surrealism which I enjoyed. But which also made me question what I was supposed to take away from some stories.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this a difficult read as it seemed very American to the point of incomprehension at times.

[Amy Watson · Rating 2 out of 5]

All the short stories in this book start strong, but the majority flail off in vague directions. Nightmarish, vicious and nonsensical- a pretty unsatisfying read

[Aron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great writer. Uninteresting characters and situations. Did nothing for me. YMMV

[Mark Tadder · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a very distinctive voice and its storytelling. It's also incredibly bleak but at least it's honest. Not sure why I read it.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taut prose telling improbable tales artfully; too like Donald Barthelme for my taste.

[Grace Katzmar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sone stories were better than others, some hard to follow- Dnf