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Dancing at the Gold Monkey
Winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize
"Renders transient moments of great beauty, to reveal the way we might transcend sorrow by our unwavering attention to exquisite detail and the mystery of creation."— Melanie Rae Thon "Time jumps in this accomplished story cycle, as does the boundary betwixt reality and dream, memory and imagination. . . . And war, as it will, soaks all. Learst writes with the special visceral authority of combat seen and visions earned. Vital, necessary reading."— Donald Anderson, author of Fire Road "The destruction of the human spirit at the hands of an experience that is as emotionally pyrotechnic and morally absurd as the behavior of [Learst's] characters."— Gordon Weaver, author of Count a Lonely Cadence A young naval officer crashes his F-16 fighter jet in the South China Sea, forever changing the lives of the five soldiers who find his body. They move through gritty post-Vietnam Detroit with the women they love in this linked collection of psychological drama, sexual escapades, and latent violence tinged with compassion, grief, and love, arriving finally at the death of one man's son in Iraq. Allen Learst's writing explores an interior war—the war of the psyche fought by all returning soldiers—and their attempts to adapt and survive without the knowledge it takes to heal or alleviate their pain. Allen Learst , a Vietnam combat infantryman, worked for Detroit's auto industry, attended college on the GI Bill, and earned his PhD in creative writing. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Marinette.
"Renders transient moments of great beauty, to reveal the way we might transcend sorrow by our unwavering attention to exquisite detail and the mystery of creation."— Melanie Rae Thon "Time jumps in this accomplished story cycle, as does the boundary betwixt reality and dream, memory and imagination. . . . And war, as it will, soaks all. Learst writes with the special visceral authority of combat seen and visions earned. Vital, necessary reading."— Donald Anderson, author of Fire Road "The destruction of the human spirit at the hands of an experience that is as emotionally pyrotechnic and morally absurd as the behavior of [Learst's] characters."— Gordon Weaver, author of Count a Lonely Cadence A young naval officer crashes his F-16 fighter jet in the South China Sea, forever changing the lives of the five soldiers who find his body. They move through gritty post-Vietnam Detroit with the women they love in this linked collection of psychological drama, sexual escapades, and latent violence tinged with compassion, grief, and love, arriving finally at the death of one man's son in Iraq. Allen Learst's writing explores an interior war—the war of the psyche fought by all returning soldiers—and their attempts to adapt and survive without the knowledge it takes to heal or alleviate their pain. Allen Learst , a Vietnam combat infantryman, worked for Detroit's auto industry, attended college on the GI Bill, and earned his PhD in creative writing. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Marinette.
130 pages, Paperback
First published October 2, 2012
About the author
Allen Learst
2 books15 followersAllen Learst is a former associate editor for Cimarron Review and a co-founder of Pinyon Review. In 2011 he won the Leapfrog Fiction Contest for his collection of linked stories titled Dancing at the Gold Monkey. He has published fiction, essays, and poetry in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Ascent, Chattahoochee Review, The Literary Review, Passages North, Hawaii Review, and War, Literature, and the Arts. He resides with his girlfriend in the Upper Peninsula. They have a cat named Nothin'. He can be reached at allen.learst@gmail.com.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 21, 2012
The Virus and Cancer of War and how it Metastasizes in the Lives of Returning Soldiers
Allen Learst does not write about war, though he has served in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and was among the damaged veterans who returned home to a land changed by influence and warping of having been a part of a war that never should have happened. Allen Learst does not write war stories, instead he writes about the festering incurable wounds war leaves on men and women who witness the horrors of combat and those whose relationships to the soldiers far away were forever damaged.
In this collection of stories DANCING AT THE GOLD MONKEY he ties at times looses threads between the stories, threads not unlike those near invisible wires that connected land mines in Vietnam that consumed the legs and arms and bodies of fighting soldiers. The characters fade in and out of these tales, each time taking on a new and altered identity yet always centered on that one spot where things seem to come together in a strange and warped way - the strip club called the Gold Monkey, a central target spot not unlike the Vietnam place that touched them all.
The book opens with a hazy little tale about ice fishing in a family distorted by mental illness and absence and loss. But it moves on with a delicate tale of a small Vietnamese immigrant whose father was a black American married to a Vietnamese woman, and was killed as the Viet Cong resumed control of Hanoi and the boy was sent to the US to find his way in life: Snakes and Dragons. We meet Micky Kodoski at the Gold Monkey and as a cabbie willing to give another recurring character Jean a favor in one story and feeling stimulated by Jasmine's lap dancing at the Gold Monkey in another.........That's the way Learst weaves his stories - in chunks of time from the past and present and then lapsing into direct stories during battle and we are never quite sure how the thoughts are going, broken as they are from the rat-a-tat-tat of artillery fire both real and remembered and imagined.
What happens in these finely wrought stories is a sensation of how minds from war zones are punctured and penetrated with little remnants of war detritus that may implode or explode at any moment - and do. Drugs, alcohol, danger, loss of a vision for the future, irretrievable disorienting lapses that make hanging onto adjusting to what is left of that nebulous meaning-challenged life back home existence - Learst puts them in front of us. But then perhaps other readers will have other responses. For those of us who are veterans of Vietnam this book is a private thing. For others it is just stupefying good literature.
Grady Harp
Allen Learst does not write about war, though he has served in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and was among the damaged veterans who returned home to a land changed by influence and warping of having been a part of a war that never should have happened. Allen Learst does not write war stories, instead he writes about the festering incurable wounds war leaves on men and women who witness the horrors of combat and those whose relationships to the soldiers far away were forever damaged.
In this collection of stories DANCING AT THE GOLD MONKEY he ties at times looses threads between the stories, threads not unlike those near invisible wires that connected land mines in Vietnam that consumed the legs and arms and bodies of fighting soldiers. The characters fade in and out of these tales, each time taking on a new and altered identity yet always centered on that one spot where things seem to come together in a strange and warped way - the strip club called the Gold Monkey, a central target spot not unlike the Vietnam place that touched them all.
The book opens with a hazy little tale about ice fishing in a family distorted by mental illness and absence and loss. But it moves on with a delicate tale of a small Vietnamese immigrant whose father was a black American married to a Vietnamese woman, and was killed as the Viet Cong resumed control of Hanoi and the boy was sent to the US to find his way in life: Snakes and Dragons. We meet Micky Kodoski at the Gold Monkey and as a cabbie willing to give another recurring character Jean a favor in one story and feeling stimulated by Jasmine's lap dancing at the Gold Monkey in another.........That's the way Learst weaves his stories - in chunks of time from the past and present and then lapsing into direct stories during battle and we are never quite sure how the thoughts are going, broken as they are from the rat-a-tat-tat of artillery fire both real and remembered and imagined.
What happens in these finely wrought stories is a sensation of how minds from war zones are punctured and penetrated with little remnants of war detritus that may implode or explode at any moment - and do. Drugs, alcohol, danger, loss of a vision for the future, irretrievable disorienting lapses that make hanging onto adjusting to what is left of that nebulous meaning-challenged life back home existence - Learst puts them in front of us. But then perhaps other readers will have other responses. For those of us who are veterans of Vietnam this book is a private thing. For others it is just stupefying good literature.
Grady Harp
January 5, 2013
A gritty, authentic collection of stories about working-class Vietnam vets in Detroit. Loved it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews