American Masculine

by Shann Ray

Winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, a muscular debut that reconfigures the American West

The American West has long been a place where myth and legend have flourished. Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains.

In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

185 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 2011

About the author

SHANN RAY is the winner of the Subterrain Poetry Prize and the Pacific Northwest Inlander Short Story Award. His work has appeared in Montana Quarterly, Northwest Review, McSweeney's, Narrative, StoryQuarterly, Poetry International and other venues.

He grew up in Montana, spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, and has lived in L.A., Alaska, Germany and Canada. His poetry was an open competition winner in the Best New Poets series. His debut collection of short stories, AMERICAN MASCULINE, won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize and appears with Graywolf Press.

Praise for AMERICAN MASCULINE:
"Shann Ray's prose brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx but is, thankfully, entirely his own. His work is lyrical, prophetic, brutal yet ultimately hopeful."
—Dave Eggers, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for WHAT IS THE WHAT

"Shann Ray writes about small western towns and their residents in tough, poetic, and beautiful ways. I recognize many of these people, and that's good, but I'm also surprised and stunned by many others, which is great. Buy the book and read it tonight. You'll love it, too."
—Sherman Alexie, National Book Award Winner for THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, Pen Faulkner Award Winner for WAR DANCES

“Written in prose both fierce and elegant, American Masculine is a commanding debut. With stories set in and around the reservation lands of the American West, Shann Ray hones the cutting edge between desire and need, despair and beauty. The scope of these stories and depth of their complexity result in an extraordinary collection that is the gift of an exceptional talent. I am reminded once again, of what it means to encounter genuine grace.”
—Claire Davis, author of WINTER RANGE

"The sentences in this book have such grace and muscularity that they seem more performed than written, and the author's images and events carry the nearly visceral weight of memory... AMERICAN MASCULINE is a powerful, resonant work of literature, and Shann Ray is a masterful and original writer."
—Robert Boswell, Bakeless Prize Judge

"Shann Ray has been up close with the vividly contrary complexities of the present-day American West, the harshness and sweetness. He's seen a lot of vast and miniscule things, and tells of them with compelling honesty. What a fine break-out collection."
—William Kittredge, author of HOLE IN THE SKY

“Shann Ray knows his place and he knows his people. AMERICAN MASCULINE is a rock-solid, permanent collection with a great deal of moral heft. These Montana stories dig deep into the heart of a landscape and more importantly into the hearts of flawed men and women whose lives, in Ray's hands, are given real weight and meaning. I'm grateful for this collection, for the depth of these characters and the beautiful patience of this writing.”
—Peter Orner, author of THE SECOND COMING OF MAVALA SHICONGO

"AMERICAN MASCULINE is a powerful fiction debut. These ten stories reveal Shann Ray's unique voice, his lyrical vision of the West, and his always-eloquent contemplation of the mysteries of grace and forgiveness."
—Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist for THE ZERO

"Shann Ray writes about men and women, white and Native American, full bred and half bred; he writes about love and betrayal, alcohol and abuse, pride, vanity, everyday losses and recoveries transpiring in ranch towns and small cities. Most of all he writes about the soul in search of its reason and its peace."
—Tom Jenks, Editor, Narrative Magazine
Co-editor with Raymond Carver of AMERICAN SHORT STORY MASTERPIECES

"Bold. Lyrical. Deeply felt. Fiercely written.
In these stories, Shann Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible." —Graywolf

Reviews

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

“He thought of his eyes on alcohol, gray coals in a brick-like face, a vicious mouth that lifted flesh from bone like a man field-dressed a deer.”

Self-consciously literary in the extreme, American Masculine is a swirl of long, incomprehensibly pretty sentences masquerading as a collection of short stories.

There is authenticity in the settings and heart in the characters, but they are largely swept aside in the look-at-me writing style, which is less an original style than one snatched whole from the MFA-in-writing playbook. The stories, to the extent that they have structure enough to be recognizable as stories, lack satisfying storytelling chops. It's one thing to be experimental; it's another to use experimentation as an excuse to avoid at least pointing characters in the vague direction of a future change of course.

That said, Shann Ray does know Montana, and he does know something of the desperation of the people living on the bottom of its rungs. And the word-swirls are, in some cases, hypnotically pretty enough to distract readers from American Masculine's myriad problems. If coherence is your thing, however, you'll look elsewhere.

[Jenny Shank · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.16/seeds...

News - From the September 19, 2011 issue by Jenny Shank

The short stories in Shann Ray's first book, American Masculine, reflect his lifelong interest in forgiveness and redemption, as well as in basketball and the American West. Ray's characters struggle to live up to their families' expectations and look up to those who are "more ready to give and forgive."

Ray, who grew up in Alaska and Montana, played basketball for Montana State University and professionally in Germany before earning his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Alberta. For the past 15 years, he has taught leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. He's also a practicing psychologist. American Masculine (reviewed in our June 11 issue) won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize. Rowman and Littlefield will publish Ray's first scholarly book, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, in November. HCN writer Jenny Shank recently spoke with Ray.

HIGH COUNTRY NEWS: You've said that redemption is one of your favorite themes in literature. Why is that?

Shann Ray: I think people are hungry for it. Coming out of modernism and branching into postmodernism, we have a glut of irony, cynicism, nihilism and characters that are difficult for people to identify with -- characters that are so interiorly dark or shattered that they're not going to rise to any type of redemption, they're just going to fall and make the reader feel like that's just life and that's what you have to do. Last century was the bloodiest in history, with 120 million war-related deaths; I think that we can see why (contemporary literature) would want to emphasize the nihilism and the emptiness of life.

But I believe there's a need for balance. I feel like a lot of the new territory in writing will come from attending to the desolation, but not ignoring the consolation, not ignoring the notion that there is in each person the seed of the potential for atonement or redemption.

HCN: One of the stories in American Masculine that made me think most about redemption is "How We Fall," in which Benjamin Killsnight and his wife, Elsie, are alcoholics. Benjamin gets sober, and Elsie does not and leaves him. After many years, she sobers up, and Benjamin unexpectedly takes her back. Why did you decide to have these two characters get back together?

Ray: Working with people as a psychologist, you see so many moments of atonement, forgiveness and redemption that I think the average person just walking down the street does not see. But if you look through your generational family, there are probably people going through recovery, or coming to an epiphany in their lives. So in that story I was trying to emphasize that. In Montana growing up, and I think just with alcoholics in general, there's often the feeling that life stinks, and then it stinks some more, and then you die. But there are a lot of people who live through major desolation and then come all the way up to a full consolation with their loved ones and with life.

HCN: Speaking of your growing up, you spent part of your childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. Is this something that haunts you?

Ray: It's still something that I look at from 20 years ago when I was on the reservation to now. My dad coached various Native American basketball teams, on the Crow Reservation and the Northern Cheyenne rez. When I go to a tournament with him -- and he still plays, at 70 -- Native American cultures always honor elders. If you actually invest your life in the reservations, the returns of friendship, laughter and love are immense. I recently went with him to the Charlie Calf Robe memorial tournament on the Blackfeet rez. They had an entire halftime devoted to my dad, and he didn't even coach on that reservation. They presented him with a beaded belt buckle and an Indian blanket, which is a symbol of being welcome in that tribe always.

And there are hauntings in my own family -- different people who didn't make it out. One of my closest, beloved cousins -- she fell all the way into the depths of drug culture and died in a drug shootout in Billings. So that, combined with a lot of my boyhood heroes, Native American athletes, a lot of them died, and that sorrow haunts me. I placed many of them right into American Masculine. I put in their direct lives and names as a way of honoring them.

HCN: You've said you're working on a novel about an "open-border L.A." Do you want to say anything more about that?

Ray: In my book, there is a Latina senator from California who succeeds in forwarding this bill that entirely opens the border with Mexico. In the context of that chaos of the open border, she eventually becomes the governor of California, and she decides that instead of all this retributive justice that we've been practicing, let's start blending in some restorative justice, similar to what South Africa did after apartheid. So basically they start taking people out of prison and give them the opportunity to face the families of the victims they killed, and setting them free after that basic confrontation. That's the novel I just finally handed in to my agent. I don't know if it's quite ready yet. We'll see.

[David Abrams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of our earliest printed literature came as a result of medieval monks secluding themselves in scriptoriums, devoting days, months, entire lives to copying sacred texts by hand. In daily ritual, these early scribes bent over the manuscript, moved pen to ink and back to page, painstakingly forming each letter with diamond precision. In the depths of the monastery, there was little sound but the faint whistle of breath from nostril and mouth, and--slightly louder--the scratch of quill on vellum. The creation of words was an act of worship.


Reading American Masculine , I began to think Shann Ray approaches his fiction with the same holy devotion. Each sentence carries the weight of an author sitting at his keyboard combing through language for hours until the right word arrives, one which jigsaws neatly into the surrounding words, a marriage of syntax and meaning. The stories in this collection from Graywolf Press are set in the American West--primarily Montana--and they are populated with tough men and tougher women, souls knotted hard by the blistering circumstances of domestic abuse and alcohol, but the pages of American Masculine are no less illuminating than those of the 13th-century monks. Ray writes not to entertain with clever plots or pyrotechnic language; his intent is to blast our souls loose with simple tales built on old-fashioned morality.

Though the stories stop short of preaching and proselytizing, some readers might be put off by the uncompromising spiritual center to be found throughout the book, but that would be their loss if they walk away from American Masculine . This is one of the more challenging set of short stories I've read in a long time--it pokes my conscience and gently leads me to self-examination. Am I better man for reading American Masculine ? I don't know, but I do feel refreshed and invigorated. In his day job, Ray teaches courses in leadership and forgiveness at Gonzaga University and some of that inevitably spills over onto the pages of the book.

The cover design shows two bison butting heads, hooves churning the earth, dust flying from their shaggy hides. So it goes with the stories where characters fight each other and, more often, themselves as they strive for the better angels of their nature. In the first story, "How We Fall," Benjamin Killsnight, who "worked on small hopes and limited understanding," wrestles against the alcoholic heritage of his Northern Cheyenne upbringing:

Benjamin had been a drinker since an uncle started him on it in grade school. Same uncle forced a drunk Sioux woman on him when Ben was thirteen and he had run from the house, crying from her terrible fingers.

The cultural stereotypes of the drunk Indian and Marlboro cowboy limn the edges of the fiction here. Ray wants us know he acknowledges that baggage but he is working on a new image of the West--one where grace and brutality co-exist. Adapt and overcome the harsh conditions, as long as you learn something along the way.

Ray is unflinching in his descriptions of violence. A father breaks his son's nose and it makes the sound "like a bootstep on fresh snow." In another story, a fistfight puts us right there at the knobby end of knuckles:

He seeks only the concave feel of facial structure, the slippery skin of cheekbones, the line of a man's nose, the loose pendulum of the jawbone and the cool sockets of the eyes. He likes these things, the sound they make as they give way, the sound of cartilage and the way the skin slits open before the blood begins, the white-hard glisten of bone, the sound of the face when it breaks. But he hates himself that he likes it.

That comes from my favorite story in the book, "The Great Divide." It's a masterfully-told mini-biography of a bull rider named Middie (the self-hating fighter) who ends up working as a "muscle man" keeping peace on a passenger train and tossing off drunks when they pull into the station. In an earlier section of the story, we see Middie as a teenager walking a fenceline in a whiteout, searching for his abusive father who left the house three days earlier and never returned:

Walking, the boy figures what he’s figured before and this time the reckoning is true. He sees the black barrel of the rifle angled on the second line of barbed wire, snow a thin mantle on the barrel’s eastward lie. He sees beneath it the body-shaped mound, brushes the snow away with a hand, finds the frozen head of his father, the open eyes dull as gray stones. A small hole under the chin is burnt around the edges, and at the back of his father’s head, fist-sized, the boy finds the exit wound.
When the boy pulls the gun from his father’s hand two of the fingers snap away and land in the snow. The boy opens his father’s coat, puts the fingers in his father’s front shirt pocket. He shoulders his father, carries the gun, takes his father home.

The scene is shocking in its details, but there is something about that act of putting his father's fingers in his pocket that speaks of tenderness and forgiveness for all the beatings that the father administered.

In many instances, it is the landscape which offers both violence and grace. In the "three-panel" story "Rodin's The Hand of God," a father must nurse his distraught daughter back to sanity after her car flips off the highway into the Madison River and her two children are killed. One day, after leaving for work, he decides to turn around and check in on her, say "I love you" one more time:

Far away, he spots her blue Ford. It is broad daylight and the garden hose looks so simple and obvious, he starts to cry. He speeds and halts and whispers to himself as he lifts her body, light, feathery in his arms, light as a sparrow or whip-poor-will, a hummingbird, small corpus made of sunlight or vapor. Mercy, he pleads, and he speeds in his car through traffic lights and signs, her body limp on the black leather of the backseat, her white face whiter than the faces of the silent performers he'd seen in Japan or the bleached buffalo skull he'd found as a boy with his father--like a huge shard of prehistoric bone--white, whiter than the white sun over the Spanish Peaks that shines as it does on him and her, on the Crazies near Big Timber and west to the Sapphires, east to the Beartooths, and north, far north to the Missions, all the way to Glacier.

Notice how softly Ray moves us from that white face in the back of the car out into the wide horizons of Montana's endless sky. Man is not just a tiny figure on the landscape; at times he is the landscape. And, through violence, the land reclaims the fragile human beings. In the exquisite story "When We Rise," which is dominated by the image of two men attempting impossible basketball free throws outdoors on a snowy night, one of those men, Shale, remembers the accident which claimed his brother Weston, a rising collegiate hoopster. Ray moves from the sublime to the tragic in the space of one paragraph:

There is a highway, the interstate east through Idaho where dawn is a light from the border on, from the passes, Fourth of July, and Lookout, a light that illumines and carries far but remains unseen until he closes his eyes and he is cresting the apex under the blue "Welcome to Montana" sign, riding the downslant to a wilderness more oceanic than earthlike, a manifold vastness of timber, the trees in wide swells and up again in lifts that ascend in swaths of shadow and the shadow of shadows until the woodland stops and the vault of sky becomes morning. Weston, alone and in their father's car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale's mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken.

The natural world in American Masculine is freighted with heavy symbolism. In Montana, we call the sky "big," but in these stories, it is often a battlefield between dark and light. Ray uses the sun, the moon and the stars as strong metaphor (sometimes too insistently strong) to illustrate the wars cannonading within each of his characters. Here the sky and land are so beautiful they make your teeth ache, as seen in this passage from "In the Half-Light":

Devin’s father pointed out the window, east toward Bozeman.
“Look at that,” he whispered.
Above the clouds the Bridgers stood clear, cut in blacks and grays, taking up much of the sky. Behind them was the scarlet horizon. While he drove his father would steal long looks. The sky's blood gathered and went out. The morning turned Devin’s face gold.
“Nothing like it, is there?” his father said.
They topped a broad rise. The truck moved from shadow to sun. The land opened wide. To the south, mountains and fields were free of clouds, open now under a sweep of sky. The road banked down and left, and the mountains parted. The river appeared again, emerald, flared by sunshine as it blazed around an arm of land.

I will confess that not all of the stories in American Masculine held my attention as tight to the page as "The Great Divide," "Rodin's The Hand of God," or "When We Rise." There are moments when the prose became so dense with meaning and weighted symbolism the words went grey on the page and my attention wandered. I think, however, this is less a fault of Ray's than it is mine and the way I let distraction pull me away. American Masculine is packed tight with prose that borders on poetry and it is up to us to bring as much care and devotion to the act of reading that Ray did to the act of writing. Even in his weakest moments, the author strives to convey a clarion call, waking us from our slumber with messages of hope, grace and forgiveness. It's up to his audience to answer that call. We, all of us, need to be like monks devoted to the holiness of reading.


This review originally appeared at The Quivering Pen blog.

[Tyler · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories all loosely connected through the themes of Montana and masculinity. Some of these stories are really dark and deal extensively on subjects such as lust, anger, violence, abuse, alcoholism, infidelity, etc. There were some places with some beautiful descriptions of the landscape such as you would read in most good western literature, but I didn't personally care for these stories and I wouldn't recommend them to friends. There were also a few places that touched on forgiveness and reconciliation, but that positive element was a very thin silver lining in some very dark clouds. For that reason I didn't enjoy reading these stories.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the note at the beginning of American Masculine, Robert Boswell, judge of the 2010 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction (which this collection won), writes that "one might call several of the stories in American Masculine experimental, much as one might accurately call the stories of Alice Munro experimental. It is part of the magic of Munro's stories that they never seem experimental no matter how inventively they are structured or how radically they are shaped. In like fashion, Shann Ray's stories do not feel experimental. In fact, they feel almost old-fashioned, written with unfashionable seriousness and the kind of multidimensional characters that become forcefully real to the reader precisely because they escape easy definition" (xi). While my enthusiasm for the collection doesn't quite reach the level of Boswell's, I think his description of the collection is apt.

The experimentation that Boswell is referring to takes the form--at least in the majority of the stories--of a manipulation of time. With the exception of "The Dark Between Them" where Ray's toying with the time in the story took me out of the narrative, he does an excellent job flashing back and forth and using the passage of time to his, and the story's, advantage.

If you are a fan of the sentence, then Ray's style should appeal to you. Stylistically, Ray's drawn comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, and I think it's pretty evident, especially with works like Blood Meridian or The Border Trilogy. However, like his experimentation with time, there are moments throughout the collection where the style gets in the way of the story--at least for my taste.

Ray's use of place--namely Montana--is brilliantly handled. He clearly knows his landscape and his people.

There is some repetition in the collection, both in the way some of the stories are structured (for example, more than one stories starts with "present" action then quickly flashes back) and in the characters. In two stories a character attended the University of Montana on a rodeo scholarship.

My only other criticism of the collection needs a short explanation. Several of Ray's stories end happily, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but when I came to the end of those stories I felt a little cheated. Of course, this says far more about my reading habits and expectations than anything, and it's probably not fair to criticize Ray for it. The best example comes in one of the better stories in the collection, "The Way Home." It's a short, simple story about a man struggling with alcoholism. He's on his way home from work, and he passes the bar where he usually hangs out. His coworkers have given him a hard time about not coming out with them, and he sees their cars parked out front. The man has a wife and newborn child at home, and the central conflict for him is whether not to stop. Everything about the story is strong, but the man passes the bar and goes home to his wife and child. Now, this is a perfectly plausible ending, and in Ray's hands it's well crafted. But for me, reading about characters who make the "right" decisions just isn't as interesting. Again, I'm completely aware that this isn't exactly a fair or objective criticism of Ray's work.

All in all, though, the collection is worth reading. In fact, based on the quality of one story alone, "When We Rise," you should check out the collection. In this story, Ray is firing on all cylinders. All the elements are at work and all work beautifully. Also of note, "The Way Home," "Mrs. Secrest," and "Rodin's The Hand of God."

For more, see my blog: http://thestoryisthecure.blogspot.com/

[Maia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I guess 'American' and 'masculine' (not capitalized) is pretty much the one strong thing I can say about this short-story collection: literary to a fault, meaning that it reads like a Richard Ford or Raymond Carver or even Sam Shepard (saving the differences) parody, and so self-congratulatory that if the author had been standing next to me while I read I'd have slapped him! Another problem beyond the mediocre writing is that the voice never truly sounds 'masculine'--this is, in my estimation, just a diffident nerd hiding behind big words.

[Siobhan Fallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous and thought provoking collection about gender roles in modern society, encompassing marriage, love, adultery, family, responsibility and heartbreak. And somehow, beautifully, in this somewhat harsh world, there is an echo of forgiveness.
Shann Ray's story, "Mrs. Seacrest," is one of the most perfect short stories I have ever read. When I finished it, I gasped, and thought to myself, "Damn, I wish I had written this."
Then I read it again.
A very talented, big-thinking, generous writer-- definitely someone to watch.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of dark narratives that dissect life in the modern West. Haunting, biting, beautiful-all soaked in the grime of subsistence. Dr. Ray has done here, and I look forward to his future work.

[Stephen Haines · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know how anyone could rate this a 4 or a 5 star book. These stories are not enjoyable to read; and I'm not talking about the content. (Although the content is, at all times, bleak.) To me, what makes all of these short pieces so unenjoyable is that they lack, in almost every sense of the word, fluidity.

From one piece to the next, this collection is line after line of prose that is trying very hard to be poetic (borderline self-congratulatory), trying not all that hard to be coherent. That is not to say that the lines always fail at Being poetic (some, on their own, are remarkably beautiful), or always fail at being clear (some moments punch you directly in the gut); but the issue for me is that throughout any given piece, I feel like I'm riding shotgun in a car where the driver has absolutely no idea how to maintain speed, or to take a turn without going up onto two wheels; I feel, when I'm reading these stories, like I get on board with what the author is doing, only to constantly be flung off again.

I've seen a lot of folks make comparisons between Shann Ray and some of the authors that he's clearly trying to emulate (McCarthy, Faulkner), but all that I really see with that are the objective details: terse, jarring sentences, ample asyndeton, and a marked lack of quotation marks. As far as the content goes, this writer does not move me the way that he seems to unashamedly move himself.

[Natalie Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Profiles a certain stripe of American masculinity but doesn’t dig much beyond the surface. It has perhaps lost its poignance since 2011, though I am not sure it was especially groundbreaking even then. Often the descriptions don’t quite make sense, nor are they as poetically brilliant as the author might think they are.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this book for an academic book prize and LOVED it. Clear, crisp writing. Shann's voice/style here is somewhat reminiscent of Corman McCarthy but I don't mean that in any sort of patronizing way. Refreshing, solid, clean. Loved it.

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic riveting stories of men and women finding their way in a violent ugly world. The Mountain West rendered with life and beauty and without sentimentality. A book that gives me hope that contemporary fiction is still capable of ambition and sincerity and vitality.

[Jakob Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this book for class. Wish I hadn't though as it was a jumble of ambiguous sins and tragedies. Just not my personal preference for reading.

[Matt Mesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appropriately titled book of very good short stories. All have a male lead character that’s flawed and trying to deal with the recklessness of love and their own lives.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really sure what Shann Ray is going for here. Yeah, we all deal with pain in different ways, but what about it???

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of short story collections lately, with an eye out, specifically, for newer collections. Of what I've read, Shann Ray's American Masculine is certainly the best.

While I'm not well-versed enough in contemporary American short stories, what I have read leads me to believe that realistic short story writers are still emulating Raymond Carver; that is to say, that a hyper-minimalist style is often used. The less said, the better. Alas, most of these authors aren't Raymond Carver.

Ray is certainly at his best when he isn't mimicking Carver. Though his line is admirably simplistic, it isn't minimalist. More importantly, Ray's narrators are intrusive as hell: they tell, they don't show; they extrapolate; they proselytize. They just don't overdo it. And that's a difficult balance to strike, I imagine.

Certainly there is a sameness to Ray's stories. They're all in Montana. They almost all feature the relationships between fathers and sons, and the effects that those relationships have on every other relationship. Characters, either primary or supporting, are usually Native American. And in the end, forgiveness is always key, and the realization that we are all flawed human beings (and this is where Shann's Christian worldview really shines through, though, surprisingly, not annoyingly). But somehow, this sameness doesn't seem like a weakness, but a formal unity that allows the stories to adhere as a collection.

The weakest stories are "Mrs. Secrest" and "The Miracles of Vincent van Gogh." In the former, Shann makes the mistake of utilizing an omniscient narrator, who jumps from one character's head to the next, sometime from one sentence to the other. In the latter, he uses a narrative device similar to the one Tim O'Brien uses in "The Things They Carried"; instead of returning again and again to a list of what the soldier's carried with then, Shann's narrator turns again and again to a description of "what men borrow." Whether intentional or not, the effect is that the story comes off as derivative.

But I can forgive all that, since "When We Rise" is as fine a short story as I've read. The premise is simple enough: two grown men search the street at night for a pair of hoops to shoot three-pointers on. The protagonist insists that they have to hit matching three pointers, bot that the same time, or move on to another set of hoops. While their journey continues, we're let in on the back story of one of them--his relationship with his dead brother, his abusive father. And since we know that the goal is to hit dual three-pointers, we know that the story will end that way, but it doesn't matter, because how he gets us there is more important.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning stories in this collection, stories of pain, sorrow, loss, and ultimately, redemption. Off but near the reservations of rural Montana, the narrators all suffer the ravages of alcoholism, child abuse, and the alienation of life in the city. The first story (How We Fall) sets the tone for the collection: Benjamin Killsnight, having left the reservation and married a white woman, stoically struggles with his own alcoholism and his wife's steady disintegration. She runs away from him, and "He worked on small hopes and limited understanding" while waiting for his wife to return. He considers the sorrowful history of suicides among his friends, she returns, and they survive.

Bleak but hopeful, the stories ring with austere images of natural life:

"In Montana on the high steppe below the great mountains the great birds called raptors fly long and far, and with their translucent predatory eyes they see for miles. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. Once he watched two golden eagles sweeping from the pinnacled heights, the great stone towers. He was three hours from Billings, west past Bozeman. The day was crisp, the sky free of clouds, the sun solitary and white at the zenith. Hunting whitetail he sat on his heels, his rifle slung across his back as he glassed the edge of coulees and the brush that lined the fields. He used the binoculars with focused precision, looking for the crowns of bucks , that would be lying down, hiding. But it was high up to his right, along the granite ridge of the nearest mountain where he'd seen movement."

These are powerful and affecting stories, almost unbearable in their intensity, yet they almost all end in healing, forgiveness, and in the final story, a marriage. Shann Ray has an engaging, unassuming voice that is clear and deeply genuine. Transcending the boundaries of regional fiction, Ray speaks to universals with calm, unblinking accuracy. Only someone with a heart of stone could read these stories and not be shaken.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much to admire in AMERICAN MASCULINE. Much. It is a deep and inventive story collection, so those of us who like to obsess about the short form find plenty to celebrate. But this is not merely a book for short story lovers. It's too soulful for that. It's too knowledgeable about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and teammates to be pigeon-holed in that way. It's open-eyed about race and class. It's sharp and true in its observations about the West (and, by extension, about America). Best of all, it's full of memorable characters and great story lines. There are no cliches here. "The Great Divide" is a fantastic story--horrifying and beautifully written all at once. "How We Fall" and "When We Rise" are graceful and poignant and blood-churning. They evoke the best of James Welch and Maile Meloy. Ray cares about language. He yearns for redemption. And those traits infuse the book with an unusual, long-lasting power.

I was also pleased to see the "triptych" form used to such good effect, though other readers may be less dazzled by such things than I. Fair enough. Those readers will never forget Middie in "The Great Divide" or striving Benjamin in "How We Fall" or forgiving Devin in "In the Half-Light." Shann Ray is the real deal.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd put this in the same category with Battleborn. Highly promising, looking forward to reading more from this author, which I absolutely will do. Interesting, the comparisons with McCarthy. Would not have thought of that--perhaps in the evocation of landscape, but stylistically, McCarthy is more stark.

Many beautiful, heartfelt sentences, gorgeous land, poignant circumstances. These tales, though, are best encountered in isolation from one another. Perhaps in separate journals, months apart. Read together, they tend to overwhelm you with a kind of sameness. Too many pretty sentences, too many men who love their women helplessly and can't do a thing about anything, etc.

Also endings. These are hard for all of us. A bunch of stories that end on the wrong note, though--just a little too far up the scale, or a little too far down, no matter the author--it becomes tough to separate the stories from one another. I felt this way about Battleborn, too. Where Ray goes up a little, Watkins goes down. They're both a little off.

Still. As I said, I'll read his next work.

[Brittany Wilmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was eager to dig into this collection of stories but also unsure what to expect. I had the fortune of knowing Shann secondhand from my time at Gonzaga (where he's a graduate professor), and also met him briefly when he stepped in to teach my leadership class one night. In person, he's intelligent and empathetic and quick-witted.

I was glad to see that in print, he's still all of these things, but with a depth that cuts to the quick. His empathy and intelligence compel him to drive to the heart of all the dark, dangerous secrets that lie within families, cultures, individuals, but then to view them quietly and at close range, clear-eyed and calm. He doesn't try to fix the problems or humor the reader, and this restraint shows great promise and poise in his work.

"Mrs. Secrest," in particular, stunned me with its sly, confusing, striking look at relationships, power, and language. I hope to see more of Shann's fiction in coming years.

[Kait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stars for the writing - it was clunky (masculine?) at times, sort of awkward and sometimes like something someone in a freshman writing class might write, feeling like they ought to. The fourth star is for the content and spirit of the stories, which I really appreciated. The characters' struggles are real, and there is redemption to be had - even if it's difficult to obtain and doesn't feel as good as maybe it seems like it should.

I was expecting something completely different, and found American Masculine to be really refreshing. I especially loved the last story, The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh.

[Kris Dinnison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection hits hard from the first story. And I wondered if I could survive such a grim set of stories in late winter Spokane. But Ray’s rich language kept me reading, and from under an initial impression of darkness emerged some hope, some compassion, and even some happy-ish endings for his characters. Most of the stories, set in the Northwest and Montana, include elements of crossing against the expectations of cultures, society, and individual relationships. There is darkness here for sure, but also some light, and at the very least some humanity that makes the stories’ characters hard to face, but also hard to turn away. http://scribbleandhum.blogspot.com

[Glen Stott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories about men living in Northwest America. The general theme revolves around men who have deep character flaws that they struggle to overcome with varying levels of success. Though the stories were good, I found the writing style even more engrossing. His style really pulled me into the scenes and the characters. I actually read this book because Shann was featured in a newsletter from the St. Labre Indian School in Montana. Though he is not an Indian, he did attend the school for a couple of years. Also St. Labre is mentioned in several of his stories.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 4 out of 5]

What the heck is the Bakeless prize? What do no-bake brownies have to do with writing short stories? Those were the first two questions that formed in my brain after I was handed a copy of Shann Ray’s debut short story collection at my local library and I glanced at the cover which proudly announced its status as the 2010 winner of the award.

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[Seth Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is wonderfully haunted by the heavy persona of Montana--each beautifully crafted story carries the tension of the "setting as character", something I haven't seen in quite some time in American fiction. The world Ray creates is heavy with native history, with the ancestry of the mountains he describes--think McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" crafted with Tobias Wolfe's lyrical language.

[Dayna Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing collection of short stories that center around the American West. These stories follow struggling men: men with addictions, former basketball players whose dreams never come true, bull rider's, and a man struggling with forgiving his abusive father. The stories also include insights into the lives of the women who love these men and must deal with their violence. A fascinating collection of stories.

[Adam Cogbill]

n/t

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

fairly brutal tellings of humans trying to love. set mostly in western usa, with lots of indians too.

on kirkus best fiction of 2011 http://www.kirkusreviews.com/best-of/...

[Anna B · Rating 3 out of 5]

tragic cruel stories. makes me thankful for my many blessings. not a huge short story fan. none of the stories resolve or have happy endings so 3 stars even tho the writing was good.

[Shawn Mitchell]

http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/...