Product Description

Starkly honest, gritty, and at times darkly humorous, the fourteen
stories in Pete Duval"s debut collection feature blue-collar workers, lapsed Catholics, bullies, and smalltime thieves struggling with their jobs, their relationships, and their families. Like the fiction of Richard Russo and Andre Dubus, many of Duval"s stories deal with both mundane and unexpected occurrences in a small working-class community. In "Wheatback," a visitor sits in the dark in a nursing home and has a strangely intimate conversation with a patient he has just met. "Bakery" gives an insider"s view of the personal conflicts among the night crew at a commercial bakery — and the horrible incident that results. "Scissors" recounts a tense confrontation in a neighborhood barbershop. In "Impala," frustration mounts when a man drags his wife along on an ill-fated trip to New Orleans. Throughout the collection, Duval explores his characters with compassion and candor and an eye for
the surprising moment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166257 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Working-class characters struggling with their fates populate the monochromatic New England landscape of Duval's 12 stories. Often lapsed Catholics, they measure the bleakness of their existence against memories of better times. In "Impala," Roy Potts persuades his wife, Maysle, to drive to New Orleans so he can relive the "fun" of his youth. Over the grim course of the trip, both Roy and Maysle suffer different variations of midlife crises, yet keep their longings and losses to themselves. Other stories feature more ambitious storytelling. In the substantial but rather disjointed "Bakery," Gus feuds with a sadistic co-worker at his factory job baking bread; in "Pious Objects," a lonely priest offers solace to a man who hasn't taken confession in 20 years. A few of the stories are dark forays into the fantastic. In "Cellular," Frank Lecuyer, a retired postal worker who lives with his "mentally impaired" wife, Gladys, and his whippet, Tex (a spirited character in his own right), fights the construction of a cellular tower bordering his property; in "Fun with Mammals," the narrator helps transport a narwhal across the country on a flatbed truck. Duval is an inventive stylist, but his pacing is hit-or-miss, and the occasional epiphany he delivers fails to balance the leaden glumness of his protagonists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Winner of the 2003 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, Duval's debut story collection takes readers on an unusual journey. A fortysomething tries to revisit his youth in an Impala. A troubled son arrives drunk to a midnight Mass honoring the anniversary of his father's death. A young man volunteers to work in a psych ward. Duval's story lines catch us by surprise, but somehow his characters, in their strangeness, speak to the universals, from the big questions to regrets to moments of "losing it" physically, mentally, or spiritually. We recognize the sad and true in these characters. Although he clearly builds on the sensibilities of writers such as Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver, Duval has a fresh voice and approach. While he can be darkly humorous in creating a man's philosophical conversations with his aging whippet, he can also offer skillful descriptions of pain. And Duval quietly reserves judgment while getting deep inside his characters and reflecting the weird chaos that exists within all our lives. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Wise, Funny, Humane
Pete Duval's Rear View is a collection of twelve stories that are astonishing and wonderful in their wit, brilliance, and toughness. Wise and leavened by humor, these stories show us how darkly impossible everyday life can be-and how we manage to live it anyway in the company of all our flaws and limitations.

What touched me most deeply was Duval's treatment of his male characters, who are burdened by society's expectations on behalf of us all. These characters expect themselves live up to ideals of manliness and responsibility as they try to deal with bullies ("Bakery," "Scissors"), bear with sick parents ("Midnight Mass," "Wheatback"), protest injustice ("Cellular"), absorb marriage and aging ("Impala," "Rear View"), speak rationality to madness ("Spectator Sport"), conserve their integrity ("Something Like Shame"), midwife one another into a violent world ("Fun with Mammals"), or simply survive ("Welcome Wagon"). Reality is always an ambush in the dark, though. In Duval's masterful hands, these characters win our respect, our understanding, and finally our empathy for not being perfect. They are like us. They are doing their best. The ultimate struggle is to forgive oneself ("Pious Object").

None of us sign up as children for these life ordeals, but we meet them anyway. In my favorite story, "Bakery," the decent main character Gus meets his nemesis in the bully Red, who wears Gus down to a nub of physical outrage. Afterwards, Gus discovers his own childhood school desk in the dark attic:

With his good hand, he pulled the desk into the center of the floor
and turned it to face north, the darkest part of the sky. The lights of New
Bedford glimmered across the river. He wedged himself into the chair.
Creaking with his weight, it felt small and wobbly underneath him. (84)

Fantastic Decription + Peculiar Plots = Excellent Stories
Pete Duval's writing and descriptive style remind me of Raymond Carver, but Duval's sense of humor, (in Fun With Mammals - a tribe of guys are transporting a stolen narwhal in the back of a flatbed, and the narwhal gives birth to...you have to read the story, but it's thoroughly bizarre and excellent)compassion, and generousity put him on a plane of his own. Each story holds a spotlight up to the daily revelations and disappointments that both keep us going and drive us down. Duval's characters are ordinary people in the grip of universal emotion. As you watch them moved by forces beyond their control, and sometimes accepting the inexplicable (Cellular has a talking whippet named Tex, who speaks regularly to the narrator) you end up pretty damn moved yourself. And pained. Spectator Sport - a story about a college kid volunteering at a mental hospital, and getting involved in competition with the patients, ("I volunteered to visit insane people at a mental hospital. I was in college. I thought it might be fun." is a perfect example. Read this book.

Flash Fiction at it's Finest
Pete Duval has fine-tuned each story in Rear View to reveal the gristly, meaty bits of life. His stories are refreshingly concise and concentrated. Duval does not waste words, and that is an admirable trait in contemporary fiction. His paradoxial themes on religion and the working class make for orignal, highly intriguing stories.

I highly recommend this collection.