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The Coming Triumph of the Free World: Stories
"DeMarinis is a wizard shaking to its literary roots the short-story genre."―Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe Rick DeMarinis possesses a power and an originality unique in contemporary American fiction. The Coming Triumph of the Free World , his second story collection, puts his flamboyant gifts on display: an amazing verbal energy, a blackly comic vision of the world as an immense booby trap, and a technical virtuosity that modulates from down-and-dirty realism to fractured fable to surreal and searing visions of madness.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
190 pages, Paperback
First published July 11, 1988
About the author
Rick DeMarinis
45 books6 followersRick DeMarinis (1934-) is an American novelist and short-story writer.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 15, 2014
She'd walked away from a twenty-year marriage without regret. The children were grown and gone. She still had time, she felt, to find out who Marianna Kensington was. Perhaps she was no one. How frightening! But how much more frightening to deceive yourself into thinking you were complete when in fact you were waiting to be filled in! The suburbs were crowded with safe and comfortable women who were essentially blank pages waiting for a violating pen.
From Romance: A Prose Villanelle, in which a woman who dreams of a cowboy romance, discovers that bodice-ripping stuff ain't all it's cracked up to be.
DeMarinis is a master at giving real-life situations a slightly absurd twist. He sees the comedy in everyday life, but also manages to milk humor from the pain. His characters contemplate buying a gun to take care of a barking neighborhood dog. They respond to a son's attempted suicide by taking his ex-sweetheart to Disneyland. They are good and bad, ordinary and evil.
I lie on the nail-bed of my life still believing I am a good-hearted, sensitive man who would never beat his wife. You know my type: the afflicted, backsliding liberal, self-aware to a fault - narcissistic, my shrink would say - but above all, not a man who would pound on a woman with his fists.
I stood over my wife telling myself these things. Her lip was bleeding. She was sobbing silently into her hands, her shoulders lifting and falling in heartbreaking shudders. I looked at my still-smoking fist. It was hot and tingling with the shock of what it had done.
From Your Burden is Lifted, Love Returns. Sad, huh? I love how he managed to detach his fist from himself and give it a personality all its own, and even IT is horrified. And don't worry. A few paragraphs later his wife will rally and knee him resoundingly in the nads.
Finally, here is one more excerpt, from the longest story in the collection, Medicine Man, in which the townsfolk grow increasingly perturbed at an eccentric local man who is able to heal their various afflictions -
Louis had begun to stop people in the street to tell them what they didn't want to hear. He would block their way and point a finger in their faces, like a crazy prophet, drunk on his own visions. "Your baby will likely be torn up pretty bad in a baler," he told a woman. who fainted dead away on the spot. "In the little sealed-off rooms behind your eyes there is a coiled-up animal itching to drill holes in your ability to figure things out," he said to Nestor Claig, the high school principal and supposedly the smartest man in town. Sometimes he'd act as if he were listening to people's deepest thoughts. He'd cock an ear at them, squint, then put his big hand on their shoulders. "The corrected promise is all you can hope for," he said to a tired-looking man of fifty. And to a bank vice president, he said, "Her mind, you know, is shot through with tidy lies. Leave her before she drags you under."
From the phrases sealed-off rooms behind your eyes to shot through with tidy lies, I think that is an almost perfect paragraph.
Many of Demarinis' books are still in print and available for Kindle. You should definitely go out of your way to look for them. But what do I know? I'm just a comfortable suburban woman still waiting for that violating pen.
From Romance: A Prose Villanelle, in which a woman who dreams of a cowboy romance, discovers that bodice-ripping stuff ain't all it's cracked up to be.
DeMarinis is a master at giving real-life situations a slightly absurd twist. He sees the comedy in everyday life, but also manages to milk humor from the pain. His characters contemplate buying a gun to take care of a barking neighborhood dog. They respond to a son's attempted suicide by taking his ex-sweetheart to Disneyland. They are good and bad, ordinary and evil.
I lie on the nail-bed of my life still believing I am a good-hearted, sensitive man who would never beat his wife. You know my type: the afflicted, backsliding liberal, self-aware to a fault - narcissistic, my shrink would say - but above all, not a man who would pound on a woman with his fists.
I stood over my wife telling myself these things. Her lip was bleeding. She was sobbing silently into her hands, her shoulders lifting and falling in heartbreaking shudders. I looked at my still-smoking fist. It was hot and tingling with the shock of what it had done.
From Your Burden is Lifted, Love Returns. Sad, huh? I love how he managed to detach his fist from himself and give it a personality all its own, and even IT is horrified. And don't worry. A few paragraphs later his wife will rally and knee him resoundingly in the nads.
Finally, here is one more excerpt, from the longest story in the collection, Medicine Man, in which the townsfolk grow increasingly perturbed at an eccentric local man who is able to heal their various afflictions -
Louis had begun to stop people in the street to tell them what they didn't want to hear. He would block their way and point a finger in their faces, like a crazy prophet, drunk on his own visions. "Your baby will likely be torn up pretty bad in a baler," he told a woman. who fainted dead away on the spot. "In the little sealed-off rooms behind your eyes there is a coiled-up animal itching to drill holes in your ability to figure things out," he said to Nestor Claig, the high school principal and supposedly the smartest man in town. Sometimes he'd act as if he were listening to people's deepest thoughts. He'd cock an ear at them, squint, then put his big hand on their shoulders. "The corrected promise is all you can hope for," he said to a tired-looking man of fifty. And to a bank vice president, he said, "Her mind, you know, is shot through with tidy lies. Leave her before she drags you under."
From the phrases sealed-off rooms behind your eyes to shot through with tidy lies, I think that is an almost perfect paragraph.
Many of Demarinis' books are still in print and available for Kindle. You should definitely go out of your way to look for them. But what do I know? I'm just a comfortable suburban woman still waiting for that violating pen.
November 12, 2022
A lot of this takes place in the past. El Passo and the west are the areas. The stories are awsome.
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June 10, 2019Metacommentary moments. Structural play. As a reader, you work your way into each story, feeling your way, getting your footing. Psychological realism, free indirect discourse. "Medicine Man," originally published in The Atlantic, sticks for its character study from a peripheral, at times collective, narrator.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews