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Johnny Too Bad
In this collection of short works, people are caught unawares by trouble and opportunity in the act of going about their daily lives... A cross between William Faulkner (Times-Picayune) and John Irving (Detroit Free Press), Dufresne once again masterfully charts the power of truth and lies and the magic hidden in the mundane.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
266 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2005
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John Dufresne
50 books143 followersJohn Dufresne teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at Florida International University. He is a French-Canadian born in America.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
July 8, 2014
Why John Dufresne Matters More Than John Gardner
by Scott Archer Jones
Let us gather together and sit in judgement. You the reader demand the right to judge, to weigh up what fiction works and what fiction doesn't, and of course, all this opinionating piles up. The sum composite of all of our beliefs tallies the verdict of time. Take two cases, and pick a winner.
John Gardner, rascal, iconoclast, a popular and an experimental post-modern author strode the landscape like a god from his first book in 1970 to his death by motorcycle in 1982. Gardner wanted to write the perfect mythological revival and the Great American Novel, and got damn close on both counts. His work is so important MFAs and PhDs revolve around it like tiny satellites.
John Dufresne, coming much later, shows the trends, the joy of writing, the dedication of one of our writers. He's built a small but rabid following and his work reads laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. He thrives on teaching (as Gardner did), but when you check the sales you can see that the world has changed – Gardner's sales were huge, Dufresne, not so much. I believe I can make the argument that Gardner failed – Dos Passos or Faulkner can lay much better claim to the Great American Novel – and that literature, our literature, is alive and kicking through authors like Dufresne.
Let us sit together to hear two stories. We can take a bearing on the two Johns in a contrast between the Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and a story from the Johnny Be Bad collection, “Died and Gone to Heaven” (2005). The first is a sprawling 600-plus-page epic full of Mesopotamic dialogue, parodies of Faulkner, Mallory and Sartre, a heap of gargoyles, capped by the transformation of a mole-like character from death-in-life into a charismatic preacher (bless the good Samaritan and the bad Samaritan alike). The other is a simple short story of Southern white trash who bully a colostomic mother into suicide-by-hygiene only to dump her body in a ditch – and a policeman's visceral reaction to the fundamental banality of stupidity.
The Sunlight Dialogues seduced thousands of readers at the time of its debut and hung onto the NYT best-sellers list for a dozen weeks. All this happened in spite of hundreds of pages of layering and blatantly academic motifs – after all, Gardner wrote in the era of Pynchon and Pirsig. The antagonist the Sunlight Man and the protagonist Clumly are Gardner's grotesques, shockingly un-beautiful. Ugly, yet either redeemed or destroyed by Love with a capital L. The first description of the Sunlight Man jars us viscerally – he carries burns like a soldier who has suffered from phosphorus and his forehead is “scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb.” The description of Clumly strikes us as hardly more endearing – “Aside from the whiteness and the hairlessness, his only remarkable features were his large nose, which was like a mole’s, and his teeth, which were strikingly white,” perfect movie-star teeth. The antithesis of the regal King Arthur (Gardner's parody), Clumly has “the look of … a man who has slept three nights in the belly of a whale.” Gardner jerks us along on a wild ride – through a handful of needless deaths, four bizarre settings, eight plot lines and close to a hundred characters. In the end, we pity the Sunlight Man trapped in some anarchistic freedom and deluded into a deadly atonement. Astounded, we wonder open-mouthed at Clumly, somehow redeemed by a vision of light as he blesses a room full of dairy men.
Gardner lands himself in an authorial stew. He doesn't know if he is freed by his existentialism or condemned by it, whether he can rationalize any affirmation of humanity and faith, of art and love or if he has to deny all chance because of his own brutal intellectual honesty. Gardner can't even decide if he tells the story's unbroken seamless dream or if he speaks directly to and of the writing as metafiction.
For those of you who don't know his work, Dufresne doesn't care if he is post-modern or retro-pre-post-modern revival. He always cares about story, even a story about a woman on a bar stool beside him, as she convinces him to write her sad tale. His work is committed to humor and horror, seasoned up in the same dish. He has fun writing and although he probably sneaks in references to Talmudic texts and Mallory's King Arthur, you need an electron microscope to find them. He enjoys ambiguity and rubs your nose in it. Are his images and phrases, his craft better than Gardener? – possibly not.
In Dufresne's story “Died and Gone to Heaven,” we are introduced to Eula, dying from a backed-up colostomy bag and rasslin' with the Lord on the bed as He transmutes into various verminous animals – one of which (I find this too good not to tell) manifests as a realtor selling Paradise cottages. She's the mother of Doyle who lusts after all things tawdry, foremost his slutty wife Gloria and after that, his TV and his mother's house. Dead Eula is bundled into a buzzard-infested ditch that becomes the allegorical search for truth. A shotgun-toting oracle named Tommy Ray takes the scene and brings Officer Gethern Kincaid in from stage left. Gethern, whose own mother was as “crazy as a bedbug” left him with a half-finished clorox milkshake and a thirst for knowing. Unable to shake off Eula's life and death, he pursues them like a reluctant dog on the scent. We are off on a car-crash ride of wife-abuse, morphing into a murder mystery and into a final admission of what happened one night on the tracks behind the Color Tile in New Orleans. In a fully rational act, Gethern kicks the hell out of Doyle's TV, cutting himself deeply. In the bayou out back he falls into an introspection as he soaks away the blood beneath the Milky Way. Gethern is “speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, from this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.” Gethern shuts his eyes and, digging his hands into the bayou mud, holds on to something human.
Even in this short story Dufresne lets us understand not only Gethern and Tommy Ray, the mother, the abusive father and the murderer, but even Doyle and Gloria as they tilt their “sponge-like faces” at the TV, honing their incredible Jeopardy skills. These most unlikely people populate a perfectly probable universe.
What matters most is that John Gardner – in spite of his copious knowledge, his obsession with philosophy, his florid imagination, his sardonic use of cartoon-ism, his shocking choice of hero – in spite of his huge gifts, doesn't care enough to love his characters. What matters most about John Dufresne is that he loves them all, even those that leave you feeling unclean, that start you off in that ditch searching for the truth. We, the jury, ….
First appeared in the Prague Revue
by Scott Archer Jones
Let us gather together and sit in judgement. You the reader demand the right to judge, to weigh up what fiction works and what fiction doesn't, and of course, all this opinionating piles up. The sum composite of all of our beliefs tallies the verdict of time. Take two cases, and pick a winner.
John Gardner, rascal, iconoclast, a popular and an experimental post-modern author strode the landscape like a god from his first book in 1970 to his death by motorcycle in 1982. Gardner wanted to write the perfect mythological revival and the Great American Novel, and got damn close on both counts. His work is so important MFAs and PhDs revolve around it like tiny satellites.
John Dufresne, coming much later, shows the trends, the joy of writing, the dedication of one of our writers. He's built a small but rabid following and his work reads laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. He thrives on teaching (as Gardner did), but when you check the sales you can see that the world has changed – Gardner's sales were huge, Dufresne, not so much. I believe I can make the argument that Gardner failed – Dos Passos or Faulkner can lay much better claim to the Great American Novel – and that literature, our literature, is alive and kicking through authors like Dufresne.
Let us sit together to hear two stories. We can take a bearing on the two Johns in a contrast between the Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and a story from the Johnny Be Bad collection, “Died and Gone to Heaven” (2005). The first is a sprawling 600-plus-page epic full of Mesopotamic dialogue, parodies of Faulkner, Mallory and Sartre, a heap of gargoyles, capped by the transformation of a mole-like character from death-in-life into a charismatic preacher (bless the good Samaritan and the bad Samaritan alike). The other is a simple short story of Southern white trash who bully a colostomic mother into suicide-by-hygiene only to dump her body in a ditch – and a policeman's visceral reaction to the fundamental banality of stupidity.
The Sunlight Dialogues seduced thousands of readers at the time of its debut and hung onto the NYT best-sellers list for a dozen weeks. All this happened in spite of hundreds of pages of layering and blatantly academic motifs – after all, Gardner wrote in the era of Pynchon and Pirsig. The antagonist the Sunlight Man and the protagonist Clumly are Gardner's grotesques, shockingly un-beautiful. Ugly, yet either redeemed or destroyed by Love with a capital L. The first description of the Sunlight Man jars us viscerally – he carries burns like a soldier who has suffered from phosphorus and his forehead is “scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb.” The description of Clumly strikes us as hardly more endearing – “Aside from the whiteness and the hairlessness, his only remarkable features were his large nose, which was like a mole’s, and his teeth, which were strikingly white,” perfect movie-star teeth. The antithesis of the regal King Arthur (Gardner's parody), Clumly has “the look of … a man who has slept three nights in the belly of a whale.” Gardner jerks us along on a wild ride – through a handful of needless deaths, four bizarre settings, eight plot lines and close to a hundred characters. In the end, we pity the Sunlight Man trapped in some anarchistic freedom and deluded into a deadly atonement. Astounded, we wonder open-mouthed at Clumly, somehow redeemed by a vision of light as he blesses a room full of dairy men.
Gardner lands himself in an authorial stew. He doesn't know if he is freed by his existentialism or condemned by it, whether he can rationalize any affirmation of humanity and faith, of art and love or if he has to deny all chance because of his own brutal intellectual honesty. Gardner can't even decide if he tells the story's unbroken seamless dream or if he speaks directly to and of the writing as metafiction.
For those of you who don't know his work, Dufresne doesn't care if he is post-modern or retro-pre-post-modern revival. He always cares about story, even a story about a woman on a bar stool beside him, as she convinces him to write her sad tale. His work is committed to humor and horror, seasoned up in the same dish. He has fun writing and although he probably sneaks in references to Talmudic texts and Mallory's King Arthur, you need an electron microscope to find them. He enjoys ambiguity and rubs your nose in it. Are his images and phrases, his craft better than Gardener? – possibly not.
In Dufresne's story “Died and Gone to Heaven,” we are introduced to Eula, dying from a backed-up colostomy bag and rasslin' with the Lord on the bed as He transmutes into various verminous animals – one of which (I find this too good not to tell) manifests as a realtor selling Paradise cottages. She's the mother of Doyle who lusts after all things tawdry, foremost his slutty wife Gloria and after that, his TV and his mother's house. Dead Eula is bundled into a buzzard-infested ditch that becomes the allegorical search for truth. A shotgun-toting oracle named Tommy Ray takes the scene and brings Officer Gethern Kincaid in from stage left. Gethern, whose own mother was as “crazy as a bedbug” left him with a half-finished clorox milkshake and a thirst for knowing. Unable to shake off Eula's life and death, he pursues them like a reluctant dog on the scent. We are off on a car-crash ride of wife-abuse, morphing into a murder mystery and into a final admission of what happened one night on the tracks behind the Color Tile in New Orleans. In a fully rational act, Gethern kicks the hell out of Doyle's TV, cutting himself deeply. In the bayou out back he falls into an introspection as he soaks away the blood beneath the Milky Way. Gethern is “speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, from this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.” Gethern shuts his eyes and, digging his hands into the bayou mud, holds on to something human.
Even in this short story Dufresne lets us understand not only Gethern and Tommy Ray, the mother, the abusive father and the murderer, but even Doyle and Gloria as they tilt their “sponge-like faces” at the TV, honing their incredible Jeopardy skills. These most unlikely people populate a perfectly probable universe.
What matters most is that John Gardner – in spite of his copious knowledge, his obsession with philosophy, his florid imagination, his sardonic use of cartoon-ism, his shocking choice of hero – in spite of his huge gifts, doesn't care enough to love his characters. What matters most about John Dufresne is that he loves them all, even those that leave you feeling unclean, that start you off in that ditch searching for the truth. We, the jury, ….
First appeared in the Prague Revue
May 22, 2011
So many times a page reading this, my first John Dufresne book, I had to step back, so moved to think, or laugh, or hurt, and as a writer, definitely be jealous. The opening "Lemonade & Paris Buns" Dufresne sets a masterful tone, that packs in its mere 3 pages a punch and a sigh at the same time, and that certainly carries on thru the book. While these stories carry a lot of big themes, you never feel weighed down. One of those big themes is writing, and often that can become a clumsy, circular mess, but in Dufresne's hands, it becomes a powerful paean to why we read, why we write, what we live for. And still, even with these big themes of life and creativity running about, there are equally just moments when it's about a good, simple, strange, but familiar, yarn. After finishing the book, I was ready to read it again. And I just might.
December 11, 2009
A romantic woman, involved with her married boss, is proposed to by a Bulgarian on a tourist visa in search of a green card and must choose between a wedding and a love affair. A doctor who has killed two women escorts a flamboyant woman home to tell her about his rage and her foolishness. Four young brothers wander into a man's backyard claiming to be foster children. They share lunch and search for the foster home that doesn't exist. After a man tells his wife that he's leaving her and his children for his new lover, he's found dead in the morning.
April 6, 2024
Of the nineteen stories, I particularly enjoyed reading “Based on a True Story,” “Epithalamion,” “Talk Talk Talk,” the title story, and “Squeeze the Feeling.” The latter may be the “best.” In a way, it “links” together a number of other stories in the same collection (such a popular editorial choice) by reprising several characters featured earlier. In “Squeeze” a writer lives with his female friend and Spot, his dog. Girlfriend gets pregnant and loses baby, but Spot, a supersensitive creature, comforts her (he possesses other powers). Dufresne displays his superb talents when in the space of just more than a page he takes readers on an emotional roller coaster climax. The man and woman are drinking in their car, and an officer detains them. When he learns of the miscarriage, he drops the citation. The officer then returns and shares a similar event which has occurred in his own life and has not been able to speak with anyone about it (including his wife). Dufresne creates an emotional turn of events in such a short distance, yet readers may weep because the exchange is so honest, so real—as are all the stories in this collection.
July 20, 2022
Great collection. Dufresne's short stories are darkly humorous and uniquely told.
June 22, 2018
The book begins so well and ends so poorly. A horrible hack job in the end, as if the writer decided he didn't want to really finish the book, and if so, he could have kept it shorter.
July 20, 2007
Okay, so not the greatest writing in the world, but I must confess that I have never been quite so entertained by the character writing of a dog. Spot kind of is the underlying adherence to these collected short stories, and without him they would be greatly lacking sincerity. Yes, canines are as sincere as it gets. A fun read.
August 5, 2007
I usually have many critiques for short story collections because they don't seem to hold together, but Dufresne's does. I have only praise.
This book is well-crafted, funny, intelligent, and above all, entertaining.
It's difficult to be so entertaining on the surface, yet be able to keep people guessing. My biggest questions: what is "fact" in here (if anything), and what is fiction? Which is a game Dufresne plays often.
October 31, 2016
Interesting collection of stories...the plots and characters really ring true which makes the stories seem autobiographical...recurring characters further reinforce this.
Clever, humorous and very well put together. When I got to the end I felt like the characters were friends and I'd like to read about their next adventures...fictitious though they are.
Clever, humorous and very well put together. When I got to the end I felt like the characters were friends and I'd like to read about their next adventures...fictitious though they are.
November 20, 2007
Another thank you to Linda for this recommendation and introduction to John Dufresne. The book consists of stories but somehow they're all inter-related and form such a nice real-life tale. This Florida writer is good!
September 30, 2014
Oh dear, another author whose entire backlist I'm now going to have to read. This is a wonderful collection - poignant, playful, sad, strange, laugh-out-loud funny and blackly comic, sometimes all in one story. Dufresne's is a wholly original voice, and one that I want to read much more of.
Want to read
June 30, 2007I took one of John's writing classes at the Seaside Writer's Conference in Florida. He's a good writer/teacher.
October 18, 2007
Dufresne reminds me a little of Tom Robbins.
I'm going to look at his novels now that I find his short stories quite well done
I'm going to look at his novels now that I find his short stories quite well done
August 14, 2008
don't you love this collection? it's so playful, so simply constructed, but with enough intelligent payback to make it worthwhile. that story about "bark park" still endears me.
July 26, 2015
John Dufresne's writing style reminds me a little of Jonathan Aimes, Dan Chaon, and Adam Davies mixed together to create something new.
April 1, 2010
These are familiar stories, with Spot the dog who keeps popping up here and there; charming children, fearing thunderstorms. Lots of good dialog, watching jeopardy...I know these people...
June 21, 2011
Extremely moving collection of short stories. Love the dog, Spot.
March 5, 2016
One of the writers I really love.
April 4, 2017
These short stories runs together like a mountain creek. I did not want it to end. I would have kept reading forever.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews