Thursday, October 20, 2005

Men Behaving Heartlessly


A Primitive Heart: Stories by David Rabe
Men Behaving Heartlessly
A Review by Anna Godbersen
The primitive heart of the title refers, literally, to the not-yet-fully-formed organ of an ill-fated fetus, but all the characters in Hurlyburly playwright David Rabe's story collection are suffering from emotional malfunctions that render them less than fully human. Take Daniel, the father of the unborn child, who always did the sort of things male characters ensconced in "muscular prose" do (in a flashback, pre-pregnancy confession of infidelity, he "demanded details, received them, then broke several pieces of furniture"). But with his wife's pregnancy imperiled, he goes beyond garden-variety alienation, turning from her to the comforts of scientific fact and lucrative stock trades. And then there's Red, a down-on-his-luck Lear jet pilot ("depressed, but not the way assholes or sissies get depressed"), who spends thirty pages hell-bent on reclaiming a debt and spending it at a strip club. Red favors triples of bourbon, but in A Primitive Heart, he is not alone in this. There is plenty of blood, shit, and piss in these lengthy, multi-chaptered tales. Some of it is even conjured with a brilliant sense of the absurd. But too often Rabe's stories, and his characters, get mired in their own flat, meandering toughness. This collection reads like a series of good lines in want of an actor, or two, who could lend them just a little bit of heart.

About the Author
David Rabe is the author of Hurlyburly, Those the River Keeps, A Question of Mercy, Streamers, In the Boom Boom Room, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, and other plays, as well as screenplays and the novel Recital of the Dog. He is the recipient of a Tony Award and three Hull-Warriner Awards for playwriting.

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2 comments:

  1. Interesting blogs! I visited each and every one of them :-)
    I would just like to thank you for commenting in one of mine. It's most appreciated!

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  2. God makes all things beautiful and wonderful.

    You visited all my blogs listed in my profile?
    How wonderful!
    There are over five other blogs not listed here.

    I never went out of my way to create all the blogs.

    Some blogs ask you to register before commenting and when you register, you have also automatically registered for another blog. And it would be embarrassing to leave the blog blank with your name on it. So, I try to keep all my blogs. But like a father of many children, I have my favourites. And they know me and I know them. But, I try to provide for all of them. Like Orikinla and Conscience of Democracy and about five others in the blogosphere.

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