Jim Cherry’s Reviews > Selected Short Stories > Status Update

The stories is short maybe what Kerouac would call sketches, or a painter a still-life. Each story focuses on one character (even if there are ancillary characters) and each seems as if Kees is just writing what he sees. That's not to say there's no artifice here, Kees juxtapositions and use of irony are the insight of an artist.

In his short stories Kees was creating a fictional town much like Faulkner did, but Kees stories are set in the fictional town of Weston, Nebraska. Each story is about or from the point of view of one the town's inhabitants, a slice of their everyday lives, and not many of Kees characters are happy, most unhappy and display the most venal of traits.