Eight Mile High

by Jim Ray Daniels

In these linked stories, the constants are the places―from Eight Mile High, the local high school, to Eight Miles High, the local bar; from The Clock, a restaurant that never closes, to Stan’s, a store that sells misfit clothes. Daniels’s characters wander Detroit, a world of concrete, where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem. Even when they leave town―to Scout camp, or Washington, DC, or the mythical Up North, they take with them  their hardscrabble working-class sensibilities and their determination to do what they must do to get by. With a survival instinct that includes a healthy dose of humor, Daniels’s characters navigate work and love, change and loss, the best they can. These characters don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves, even when they stumble. They dust themselves off and head back into the ring with another rope-a-dope wisecrack. These stories seem to suggest that we are always coming of age, becoming, trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in this world, attempting to figure out a way to forgive ourselves for not measuring up to our own expectations of what it means to lead a successful, happy life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2014

Reviews

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier this week I reviewed a book based in North Dakota, and went on a bit about my experience living there and the impact that had on my review. For the second time this week I find myself talking about the same thing, though this time it is about how growing up in Metro Detroit affects my read of Eight Mile High. Short answer? A great deal, but that should not stop you from searching out this collection even if you have no connection to the Motor City.

Though younger than the author by a few years, we grew up in roughly the same era and in roughly the same place. Daniels grew up in a first ring suburb in Macomb County, east of Detroit, I grew up in a first ring suburb in Oakland County west of Detroit. My suburb was more affluent than his. No one who lived near me worked the line at the plants, some were engineers or executives, many more were professionals and business owners. That said, my dad owned stores on the east side, and I grew up from the age of 7 working in St. Clair Shores (which is not as lovely as it sounds, like other east side working class suburbs they went for pretty names and ugly streets with garages big enough to house your fishing boat but too small to also house your car(s) -- see, eg, Sterling Heights and Madison Heights.)

I know the people Daniels is talking about, and he does an exceptional job of getting inside of these men. (Women are side characters, and though he casts a sympathetic eye on them, he understands women less.) Daniels writes with great elegance and insight about people whose ambitions have been trampled. Boys taught that aspiration meant working a skilled trade on the line, of not working the alky or lobster shifts. He introduces us to adults already hollowed out by days filled with repetition, on the line and off the line. He writes too about those few who aspire to education or to work which takes them to places even loftier than the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club. He writes about the impostor syndrome. He writes about finding that outside of Warren (or East Detroit, or Wyandotte, or Roseville, or....) there are scores of people who excel academically and not just a handful, and that to go up against them you have to work hard and have faith in yourself. Daniels also writes exceptionally well about boys and men longing for sex and love and connection. There are some stories, and some portions of stories which are a bit ham-fisted - I think a better editor would have done a lot -- but overall this is excellent, and it chronicles the lives of people rarely chronicled. These people were the first Reagan Democrats ever studied. (Really, Macomb County is ground zero for Reagan Democrats who then became Trump Nation https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/op....) And Michael Moore did a good job helping us to understand a similar population in Roger and Me. (Funny story -- my college boyfriend was from Flint and was very close to Michael and to Wendey Stanzler who edited Roger and Me. The night before I graduated MSU, as said bf and I were taking off to backpack for a couple years, Wendey and Michael told us over some Stroh's beers they were making a movie about Flint and about auto workers and we laughed and laughed. But I digress) But all this study has been nonficiton, and these folks are rarely (never?) the subject of fiction, which can do so much more than nonfiction to help us understand people, to empathize.

I wondered as I read this if it would be of great interest to non-Detroiters. I still don't know the answer. I am exceptionally non-nostalgic about the D. There are still things I think of fondly, but my entire goal in life from about the age of 5 was to get out of Detroit, and I left Michigan 3 days after college graduation never to return for more than a quick visit. I have not been back to the Detroit area in 14 years, since my father passed away (Up North doesn't count, its a different world.) But Detroit is still an essential part of who I am. It soaked into me for 21 years, and into my parents for their entire lives. This is a component of my story that non-Detroiters never fully understand. And so maybe I loved this collection of stories more than someone without the same roots would not, but I think in these well-drawn characters there is something for other people to learn from and enjoy. For my money it tells people a whole lot more about Trump Nation than Hillbilly Elegy and it does it with a more loving and empathetic eye. Well worth your time. If any non-D people read this, please let me know what you think. I am really interested in whether the lives of shop rats and their progeny is too insular and pedestrian for others. Also, if you do end up liking this book I cannot recommend the book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line strongly enough. It is brilliant, and hilarious and heartbreaking. Rivethead and this book will tell you a lot about how we got where we are.

[Brandon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read Eight Mile High for work (I record and edit audio books). I think this book has merit, I personally didn't like the style. Jumping from one short story to the next made it difficult for me to see the books larger themes and overall purpose. I also felt that I couldn't really relate with the characters. My own father works in the auto industry, but he is loving and kind to me. Overall this book was not for me.

[Andrea Janov · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these short stories / vignettes, because like Daniels' poems they are not pretentious yet treat their subjects with respect. You felt the urgency of leaving or the resignation of staying in every story, from every narrator.

If I was to offer any criticism, it is that some of these lines are so beautiful that I wish they were poetry and not buried within paragraphs.

[Meghan]

Skimmed looking for stories for a program. I have seen him read poetry live which was amazing. Stories hit less hard, but I found one I liked.

[Scott Southard · Rating 4 out of 5]

On WKAR’s Current State, I reviewed the new collection of short stories by Jim Ray Daniels. Eight Mile High was also selected this year as one of the Michigan Notable Books.

You can listen to my new review here: http://wkar.org/post/book-review-jim-...

If you would rather read my review, you can do so below.

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Book Review: Eight Mile High by Jim Ray Daniels

Ray Bradbury is an idol among science fiction fans. Generations of readers know him for sci-fi classics like The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451. But my favorite book of his has always been Dandelion Wine. While reading the new collection of short stories by Michigan writer Jim Ray Daniels, my mind kept returning to it. The stories in Daniels’s new book Eight Mile High have a lot in common with Bradbury’s American classic.

Both Dandelion Wine and Eight Mile High try to capture moments in a person’s life and hometown through stories. In Dandelion Wine, Bradbury looks back at his hometown through the fictional Green Town, Illinois—an idyllic place with the possibility of wonder around every corner. But Daniels isn’t wearing Bradbury’s rose-colored glasses when he remembers Warren, Michigan. His world is hard, and his characters are surrounded by drugs, violence, and regret. It’s about as far from the suburban bliss of Green Town as you can get.

There are 14 stories in Eight Mile High, but they aren’t totally independent of each other. Every story is connected to the others through intermingling characters and plots or references to situations from earlier tales. It is a fun device when successful and I wish Daniels could have taken it further. One problem is that since most of the tales are in first person, you can’t always tell who is speaking or if you’ve heard their voice before. It seems like Daniels wants it both ways: he wants the stories to connect to each other, but also wants the reader to recognize each story as its own world. It can be a tad confusing.

My favorite story in the collection is “Pearl Diving.” It is about first loves and first losses. The story’s young narrator is secretly dating Marlene, but her family doesn’t approve of because of their ages. They meet up to steal kisses while her parents are away from the house. Of course, that doesn’t stop her neighbor Rita Wakowski from spying on the two. Everything about the story from the kids to the relationship is sweet and innocent until a tragic fire changes everything.

Another complaint I have with Daniels’ writing is that he seems to come from the “write what you know” camp. While a lot of writers stand by that rule, thinking it brings a sense of realism and truth to their writing, I think it can take away a writer’s creative spark. You lose the unpredictability that emerges when a writer steps out of their comfort zone. So while there were really no surprises for me in the collection, Daniels did make up for it with some of his own unique literary tricks in the work. He even appears in one of his own stories, but I won’t spoil the fate of his doppelganger here.

Eight Mile High is Jim Ray Daniels’ love song to his childhood and hometown. He sees it for what it is, a rustbelt city with poverty and struggles, but still manages to find beauty there. Warren, Michigan might not be the charming paradise of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, but to Daniels, the city is something even better… it’s home.

[Joseph Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eight Mile High is a beautifully written and often hilarious linked short story collection that examines the dysfunctional lives of working class people living in Warren Michigan a township south of Detroit whose economy is dominated by the local Ford plant where many of its denizens end up pulling one of the three round the clock shifts.

The plant dominates the local economy and it dominates the lives of the people in Warren like a powerful, unavoidable force of gravity. Whether folks want to work there or not; whether first generation college kids seek to break free or not, they are all inevitably drawn back to working at the Ford plant, which is often referred to as simply ‘Ford’, as in, “I got a job at Ford….”

Most of the action takes place in the 1970s, and its focus is on the remembered youth of growing up in Warren during the final moment of Detroit’s dominance. It charts the analogue moments in the lives of a generation of auto-workers when the living was still relatively good, before globalization, cell-phones, computers and cheap labor elsewhere destroyed a way of life that now exists only in the memories of people who were there living the life. Fortunately, for all of those people, there is now this book that brings this world to remarkable life with stunning fine grained detail.

I now want to pause and say this: I grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, a similar working class community in a northwestern suburb of Chicago and I was struck at how accurately the author recreated the experience of what my life was like in the 1970s when Vietnam Vets were returning home, where fathers worked their asses off in hard-grinding jobs, where the kids, what we called, ‘Burnouts’, skipped out on school and got high or drunk and just did stupid things and died because they flew out of car windows in drunken car accidents, where having fun was beating the crap out of people with funny names like Gerard, and where the most affection you could ever expect to get was a hard punch on the shoulder or a knee kick to the thigh followed by jocular laughter. Eight Mile High captures the profoundly mixed emotions of kids who want to belong to the working class community of Warren and who want to flee it but who also seem to intuit that by fleeing it they will lose the most precious thing of all that the community of Warren has so indelibly given them: their identity. In other words, this book is a rock and roll victory flag, a banner of pride and hurt and joy for anyone raised in working class communities--whether Warren Michigan or Wheeling Illinois--and who lived the life at the final moment before all those working class communities collapsed. Readers from these communities will alternately find themselves laughing with recognition and then, at the same moment, shedding tears saying to themselves all along: Yes, that’s it exactly. That’s how it was—and oh, it’s gone.

[John Jeffire · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are lucky, you discover a writer who speaks your language: your neighborhood, the smack talk of the kids hanging in the street down the block, the older siblings who kicked your ass and set a bar you could never reach so you didn’t bother trying, the lovers you treated too well or not well enough, the father unable to communicate any sense that he liked let alone loved you. For Detroit poetry lovers, Philip Levine is the voice. For Motor City prose hounds, it’s Jim Ray Daniels. The landscape is suburban Warren, and the characters are mostly working class kids coming of age in a world over which they have little control but they are determined to act otherwise. In some cases, as in the story “Dream House,” the less they know, the better and the less they will be hurt by forces they are powerless to combat. My personal favorite is “Raccoon Heaven,” where even a street-wise, worldly ex-drug dealer trying to forge a new, clean path in life finds himself up against enemies he cannot defeat, and this new path dead ends at a dying pond. And who amongst us who grew up in metro Detroit back in the day was not at some time the narrator of the tale “Et Tu,” who observes, “I strode my capital I self-important/conscious/absorbed ass down the gritty rubble of Rome like the star of my own music video when I had yet to write the song.” Yeah, guilty as charged.

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning stories, so achingly well described. Whether you grew up in Detroit area or not, these stories surround you with the flat landscape of the factory looming over everything you see and feel and are destined for.

My favorites are the early stories of growing up. One says "I was often rejected by the surly teenagers..in their sense of privilege and clueless pride. It was my dream to someday become a surly teenager and I was well on my way..."

Describing one father "The army taught him to swim and to swear and to guard the tight lid of his heart....He was tanned by grease and darkness and the red-hot hands of the time clock...He fell off the ledge, or off the high wire and into Niagara Falls, where he emerged at the bottom, putting the finishing touches on his barrel."

Note to book club: a breathtaking addition to the nature/nurture discussion.

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Potent short-story collection by the Detroit-bred writer. The stories are linked by characters who grew up on, or still lived in, that city's industrial outskirts, in the shadow of the Ford plant, and they're expectedly full of blue-collar humor, blue-collar pathos and blue-collar hopelessness. Most of the stories take place in the 60s and 70s, amidst kids and teenagers and young adults. But there's a lot more formal invention here than you might expect from the subject matter, with Daniels edging at times into meta-fiction, and ranging beyond Detroit, as in a very funny sort of romantic comedy about a Detroit college student who becomes an intern at a right-wing WAshington think tank in the Nixon years. The book encompasses many perspectives and many tones. Good stuff.

[Katherine Wilkins Bienkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories written by a poet--every word a nail.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much imagery! This book of short stories conjures up a lot of memories. Being from Warren, MI is not a requirement. Just being from the Detroit area is enough.