My People's Waltz

by Dale Ray Phillips

These award-winning stories introduce a heartbreaking and hilarious new voice in Southern American fiction. "When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people. I sold fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than my own." This is the voice of Richard, the winning and irrepressible narrator of this novel in stories. Here, we follow Richard's chaotic childhood informed by his parents' passionate and rocky marriage, his mother's nervous breakdowns, his traveling salesman father's erratic attempts to earn his mother's love again, and their eventual divorce, through Richard's own trials with the women in his life.

Richard is like a traveler or pilgrim, moving from Haw River, North Carolina, to Arkansas to the Texas Gulf Coast and finally back to North Carolina again, as he and his people ― they drink hard, dance in their kitchens, lie and cheat ― struggle with their love and wrestle with their often inharmonious natures. In the end the narrator struggles to straighten out some small piece of his heart's crooked essence. My People's Waltz sadly celebrates the decisions we make to get on with the business of living.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

192 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1999

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is prose writing at its best, and it's clear why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. This series of interlinked stories featuring a helpless, hapless, but not hopeless protagonist is sure to charm. The sentences are amazing, and Phillips never falters.

[Bamboozlepig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely written set of short stories that are linked through the MC. He details a chaotic childhood and somewhat troubled adult life in beautiful prose.

[Francisco Manuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dale Ray Phillips’s My People’s Waltz is a remarkable, if singular, contribution to American short fiction. This debut—and to date, only—collection bears the unmistakable marks of the MFA-to-publication pipeline: exquisitely crafted stories shaped in the crucible of workshops, lauded in literary journals, and then bound into a single, powerful volume. Phillips joins the likes of Stephanie Vaughn (Sweet Talk) and Z.Z. Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere)—writers whose debut collections announced major talent, only for that promise to remain suspended, not followed by a second act.

But to dwell on what hasn’t come is to risk missing what My People’s Waltz achieves. With prose that evokes Faulkner’s lyrical density and Barry Hannah’s raw electricity, Phillips follows his narrator Richard through a haunted landscape of Southern masculinity—where men reckon with the shadows of divorce, failed fatherhood, and inherited grief. The stories pulse with quiet violence and emotional intelligence, from childhood trauma to marital disillusionment.

There’s a critique to be made of an MFA system that grooms talent only to have it vanish into tenured obscurity. Yet perhaps the brilliance of books like this is precisely in their rarity—a single, perfect waltz rather than a full dance card. My People’s Waltz is filled with flawed families, aching memory, and the kind of beauty that lingers long after the last page. It may be all we ever get from Phillips—but it’s more than enough.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard just can’t get things right, and Phillips keeps telling us how. Dale Ray Phillips opens My People’s Waltz with two lines from Theodore Roethke’s, “My Papa’s Waltz:”photo

“But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.”

The waltzing boy in Roethke’s poem could easily be Phillips’ Richard. In ten short stories, Richard narrates the story of his life from his (chosen) mute boyhood in a tumultuous home to the (reluctant) home birth of his first child to the (slow) decline of his parents. Through every major life event, the characters waltz together: literally, when it seems the only option, and figuratively, as they hang on for their lives.
Read the rest here:
http://friendsofatticus.wordpress.com...

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a short story reader or writer feel ashamed that you've not read the craft of Dale Ray Phillips yet.

Modern southern gothic in the sense of Flannery O'Connor & James Dickey but classically its own.

True that I've painted houses with Dale Ray and we've put fish on the table many a time, but do yourself a favor and sit back with My People's Walz and feel the beat.

[Danna · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing collection of ten linked stories. If you're a writer, you'd sell your soul to be able to write sentences like these, and whatever else you have left over, to make a reader love these characters as much as you will.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tracked down this novel-in-stories in a used bookstore in Arkansas, and I'm glad I did. Dale Ray Phillips has only published this collection, and it came out in 1999. I know many people are anxiously awaiting his next book. Count me among them.

[Bill Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of short stories written by my childhood friend.

[Charles Michael Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread. My God these are perfect short stories.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved the descriptions of people and places and the aches and the generational mapping of love and ache. it seemed all genuine, not mere stereotypes of southerners and poor people problems.

[Meg Sye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book by a valued professor of mine. The voice of Richard swallows the reader whole and refuses to let go, with unabashed, sometimes painful honesty.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. I hope there is more of his writing to come.

[Billie Pritchett]

Will review later