Jonathan Corcoran
Auteur de The Rope Swing: Stories
A propos de l'auteur
Jonathan Corcoran received a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction writing from Rutgers University-Newark. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. This is his debut book. Learn more at jonathancorcoranwrites.com.
Œuvres de Jonathan Corcoran
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
Membres
Critiques
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A once-booming West Virginia rail town no longer has a working train. The residents left behind in this tiny hamlet look to the mountains that surround them on all sides: The outside world encroaches, and the buildings of the gilded past seem to crumble more every day.
These are the stories of outsiders—the down and out. What happens to the young boy whose burgeoning sexuality pushes him to the edge of the forest to explore what might be love with another boy? What happens when one lost soul finally makes it to New York City, yet the reminders of his past life are omnipresent? What happens when an old woman struggles to find a purpose and reinvent herself after decades of living in the shadow of her platonic life partner? What happens to those who dare to live their lives outside of the strict confines of the town’s traditional and regimented ways?
The characters in The Rope Swing—gay and straight alike—yearn for that which seems so close but impossibly far, the world over the jagged peaks of the mountains.
My Review: As a whole, this collection deserves possibly more than four stars, but I couldn't get past a feeling of distance that prevented me from becoming fully wrapped up in the life of this West Virginia town. No less a luminary than Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite remains a favorite of mine years after reading it) praises Corcoran's work. He even got a laudatory review from KIRKUS! I hope his life partner had that embedded in lucite.
As is my habit with collections, I'll go story by story and give some opinions on each:
"Appalachian Swan Song" sets the tone for this collection of loosely interlinked collection of vignettes limning the decline and death of a small West Virginia town whose economic purpose has been served, so it is cut adrift by the rest of the money-making world. The very last passenger train is ceremoniously leaving town. All the great and the good, including the widow of the former governor, gather at the depot to ride the last train or to wave it adieu. Festively marking their world's death seems strange, doesn't it? But there was a time that the major civic events of most towns' lives were marked in similar fashion. It's certainly gone out of style now. It's hokey, it's corny, but it was also a way to experience community. Certainly not something we do much of here in the 21st century. Like passenger trains, it's something that seems worth reviving.
"The Rope Swing" Ah, adolescence! That horrible, awkward, miserable time when your body and mind stop making sense even to you! Add being queer and living in a dinky little burg with people you've known your whole life and, well, what could possibly go right? I think all Adult Survivors of Childhood can relate to the misery of knowing (sort of) what you want (but are terrified) to say to your crush object:
And the poor lad in this story has a crush object who is quite clear about what he wants, leading the two of them out onto the rope swing that ends hesitation and compels action. The story ends there, in that magic, liminal space of having made the jump but not the landing.
"Pauly's Girl" For me, the second-most relatable story in the collection. The weird grief-space of the intimate, platonic partner of a dead "friend" isn't in any way acknowledged by existing support systems. A dear and valued woman-friend of mine, whom I'd known for 26 years, died suddenly. I was distraught, and those around me at that time looked at me as though I was a head case for being upset that someone I'd spoken to daily, someone I'd traveled tens of thousands of miles with, was missing from my world. It is an amputation, and others don't spare that relationship's specialness a moment's thought. Pauly's girl can't quite figure out what to do, think, or feel, since she's always had Pauly around to lead. The story ends hopefully, though:
"Through the Still Hours" is a painful reminder of a tale that no matter what, with the best of intentions, relationships change and not always for the better. A male couple, living in the midst of all the people they've always known, celebrate their fourth anniversary in a sexless, silent struggle to come to grips with their basic incompatibility. Who knows when it began to eat at one or both of them, who cares why, now is the moment the problem comes to a head like a boil. Their oblivious friends, the supposed celebratory dance outing, none of it is distracting enough. Over is painful, but real.
"Felicitations" is the least interesting story to me, perhaps because the world of the wealthy West Virginians is the setting. I've been around those people most of my life, and they are boring to me. The doctor sexing up another doctor story does nothing for me, either. As to the stakes set into the story, well...seems to me she is cold and selfish and he is a wussy, and that's without interest to me, too. YMMV, of course.
"Corporeal" sets a misfit adolescent girl on a search for her father. Her mother's a class-A head case, her father lives on the wrong side of the tracks in a place that at best is somewhere most of us would consider the wrong side of the tracks. She speaks to her father's neighbor, an older man finishing out his allotted span in squalor and drunkenness. It's sort of exciting for an adolescent to relate to an adult one-to-one. As such things often do, however, her social time with the old man ends with his grappling with her, kissing her. And then from wherever his decency sank some bubbled up and he throws the child out. As she leaves to slink quietly home, she comes to a decision:
"Hank the King" follows a colossal loser through his daily routine, until one too many screaming matches with his wife send him off to gamble and drink his empty, loveless day away. He finally gives up his last masculinity-defining object, a prized gun, and returns to his loveless home, gives his wife $1000, and goes on a bender. Wonderfully enough he loses all his stake money, all his winnings, and none of his despair. Happy ending? How would that even look to a man in Hank's kind of life? And so I say it's wonderful because Corcoran doesn't pretty it up or grubby it down. It's real, it's true. Trust him. Trust Hank, too.
"Excavation" takes a pair of teens into the forbidden precincts of a condemned and collapsing school, relic of the town's palmier days as a transportation hub for the Appalachian treasure being stripped out...wait, different topic...so these two kids, scared of the dark, musty, and truly dangerous building, go searching for something, anything interesting to take out and prove they were there. When a fire starts by means unknown, they're trapped until they put their heads together and escape through a double-boarded window. Running away, they discuss in a swivet the fear of being blamed for the fire. In the end, holding hands, the fire consumes the superfluous grandeur of the school and cements this young pair into a couple.
"Brooklyn, 4 a.m." is a tender love letter to a long-term partner. It is short and it is complete and it is full of joy.
"A Touch" upset me quite a lot, as it focuses the attention of an older, neurotic mess of a man on a young survivor of a horrific hate crime. The nature of the crime brings me to the edge of screaming, but I will leave it for you to discover. The older man's response, a repelled fascination that his drinking buddy encourages him to leave by not being so obvious..."leave the poor man alone"...ends with a close approximation of stalking, yet another point of anger for me. So while I can't say I enjoyed this story, I can attest to the honesty and effectiveness of the writing: I was a trembling, nauseated wreck when I finished it.
My take on Jonathan Corcoran is that we'll hear more from him, and it will be good and get better. Start here with this collection, say you knew his writing when.… (plus d'informations)
The Publisher Says: A once-booming West Virginia rail town no longer has a working train. The residents left behind in this tiny hamlet look to the mountains that surround them on all sides: The outside world encroaches, and the buildings of the gilded past seem to crumble more every day.
These are the stories of outsiders—the down and out. What happens to the young boy whose burgeoning sexuality pushes him to the edge of the forest to explore what might be love with another boy? What happens when one lost soul finally makes it to New York City, yet the reminders of his past life are omnipresent? What happens when an old woman struggles to find a purpose and reinvent herself after decades of living in the shadow of her platonic life partner? What happens to those who dare to live their lives outside of the strict confines of the town’s traditional and regimented ways?
The characters in The Rope Swing—gay and straight alike—yearn for that which seems so close but impossibly far, the world over the jagged peaks of the mountains.
My Review: As a whole, this collection deserves possibly more than four stars, but I couldn't get past a feeling of distance that prevented me from becoming fully wrapped up in the life of this West Virginia town. No less a luminary than Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite remains a favorite of mine years after reading it) praises Corcoran's work. He even got a laudatory review from KIRKUS! I hope his life partner had that embedded in lucite.
As is my habit with collections, I'll go story by story and give some opinions on each:
"Appalachian Swan Song" sets the tone for this collection of loosely interlinked collection of vignettes limning the decline and death of a small West Virginia town whose economic purpose has been served, so it is cut adrift by the rest of the money-making world. The very last passenger train is ceremoniously leaving town. All the great and the good, including the widow of the former governor, gather at the depot to ride the last train or to wave it adieu. Festively marking their world's death seems strange, doesn't it? But there was a time that the major civic events of most towns' lives were marked in similar fashion. It's certainly gone out of style now. It's hokey, it's corny, but it was also a way to experience community. Certainly not something we do much of here in the 21st century. Like passenger trains, it's something that seems worth reviving.
"The Rope Swing" Ah, adolescence! That horrible, awkward, miserable time when your body and mind stop making sense even to you! Add being queer and living in a dinky little burg with people you've known your whole life and, well, what could possibly go right? I think all Adult Survivors of Childhood can relate to the misery of knowing (sort of) what you want (but are terrified) to say to your crush object:
He's afraid that he'll cower into himself again like every other day, and then say nothing at all when he really wants to say everything--to speak his body and his heart into existence.
And the poor lad in this story has a crush object who is quite clear about what he wants, leading the two of them out onto the rope swing that ends hesitation and compels action. The story ends there, in that magic, liminal space of having made the jump but not the landing.
"Pauly's Girl" For me, the second-most relatable story in the collection. The weird grief-space of the intimate, platonic partner of a dead "friend" isn't in any way acknowledged by existing support systems. A dear and valued woman-friend of mine, whom I'd known for 26 years, died suddenly. I was distraught, and those around me at that time looked at me as though I was a head case for being upset that someone I'd spoken to daily, someone I'd traveled tens of thousands of miles with, was missing from my world. It is an amputation, and others don't spare that relationship's specialness a moment's thought. Pauly's girl can't quite figure out what to do, think, or feel, since she's always had Pauly around to lead. The story ends hopefully, though:
She walked down the lawn and surveyed the world as they'd both seen it--the wild limbs of the leaning apple tree, the golden-brown evening sky, the black silhouettes of the mountains. The trunk and the branches of the tree had bent over the years, under the weight of the heavy fruit. One of the biggest branches had grown down from the canopy of the leaves, all the way to the ground and straight along the grass...the end of that same branch had begun growing up again, at a right angle, the wood bending toward the sky.
"Through the Still Hours" is a painful reminder of a tale that no matter what, with the best of intentions, relationships change and not always for the better. A male couple, living in the midst of all the people they've always known, celebrate their fourth anniversary in a sexless, silent struggle to come to grips with their basic incompatibility. Who knows when it began to eat at one or both of them, who cares why, now is the moment the problem comes to a head like a boil. Their oblivious friends, the supposed celebratory dance outing, none of it is distracting enough. Over is painful, but real.
"Felicitations" is the least interesting story to me, perhaps because the world of the wealthy West Virginians is the setting. I've been around those people most of my life, and they are boring to me. The doctor sexing up another doctor story does nothing for me, either. As to the stakes set into the story, well...seems to me she is cold and selfish and he is a wussy, and that's without interest to me, too. YMMV, of course.
"Corporeal" sets a misfit adolescent girl on a search for her father. Her mother's a class-A head case, her father lives on the wrong side of the tracks in a place that at best is somewhere most of us would consider the wrong side of the tracks. She speaks to her father's neighbor, an older man finishing out his allotted span in squalor and drunkenness. It's sort of exciting for an adolescent to relate to an adult one-to-one. As such things often do, however, her social time with the old man ends with his grappling with her, kissing her. And then from wherever his decency sank some bubbled up and he throws the child out. As she leaves to slink quietly home, she comes to a decision:
She was not sure if she knew her father, or even if she wanted to anymore. She wanted to go home into her bed and hide under the covers. She took her father's key from her key ring. She left it carefully on the doorstep and ran through the quiet night toward home.
"Hank the King" follows a colossal loser through his daily routine, until one too many screaming matches with his wife send him off to gamble and drink his empty, loveless day away. He finally gives up his last masculinity-defining object, a prized gun, and returns to his loveless home, gives his wife $1000, and goes on a bender. Wonderfully enough he loses all his stake money, all his winnings, and none of his despair. Happy ending? How would that even look to a man in Hank's kind of life? And so I say it's wonderful because Corcoran doesn't pretty it up or grubby it down. It's real, it's true. Trust him. Trust Hank, too.
"Excavation" takes a pair of teens into the forbidden precincts of a condemned and collapsing school, relic of the town's palmier days as a transportation hub for the Appalachian treasure being stripped out...wait, different topic...so these two kids, scared of the dark, musty, and truly dangerous building, go searching for something, anything interesting to take out and prove they were there. When a fire starts by means unknown, they're trapped until they put their heads together and escape through a double-boarded window. Running away, they discuss in a swivet the fear of being blamed for the fire. In the end, holding hands, the fire consumes the superfluous grandeur of the school and cements this young pair into a couple.
"Brooklyn, 4 a.m." is a tender love letter to a long-term partner. It is short and it is complete and it is full of joy.
"A Touch" upset me quite a lot, as it focuses the attention of an older, neurotic mess of a man on a young survivor of a horrific hate crime. The nature of the crime brings me to the edge of screaming, but I will leave it for you to discover. The older man's response, a repelled fascination that his drinking buddy encourages him to leave by not being so obvious..."leave the poor man alone"...ends with a close approximation of stalking, yet another point of anger for me. So while I can't say I enjoyed this story, I can attest to the honesty and effectiveness of the writing: I was a trembling, nauseated wreck when I finished it.
My take on Jonathan Corcoran is that we'll hear more from him, and it will be good and get better. Start here with this collection, say you knew his writing when.… (plus d'informations)
1 
richardderus | Apr 24, 2016 |
richardderus | Apr 24, 2016 | Prix et récompenses
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 3
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 27
- Popularité
- #483,027
- Évaluation
- 4.4
- Critiques
- 2
- ISBN
- 5
When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.
In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran's story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother's choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Y'all remember my four-star review of The Rope Swing? The man who wrote that, wrote this. What I noted then was that I felt removed from the people in his stories, like something I'd expected to be immediate and intimate was not quite that.
Objection overruled, eight-years-ago me.
The story of a Southern son...and Appalachia, where Author Corcoran hails from, is its own thing but is also The South...of a religious Mama who, in firm in her Faith, rejects her child whom she bore, nurtured, and loved, is not new nor is it underrepresented in the literary scene. UPK made the book available to me; I respected the author's chops; I started the read cautiously optimistic that it would be a Good Read. And that it was.
Being raised by a religious mother is often troublesome for a son. She often uses faith as a punishment. Her efforts to parent are more likely to be aimed at one's religious well-being and not quite concerned enough with the problems of being an adolescent. What Author Corcoran does in his memoir is to make you part of the fabric of the troubled (and frankly troubling to my atheist eyes) family he came from, and overcame. His education at elite Brown University, where my own eldest sister graduated from, drew him away from the limited life of his borderline impoverished, uneducated, Bible-believing family; not coincidentally, it introduced him to his desire's fulfillment in the gay demimonde, so to speak, of university life.
Once that genie's out of the bottle, that is that. Gawd stops being The Big Bad, and sex becomes possible to imagine as part of one's life without thunderation and guilt. Until, of course, one goes home.
It might be this bit that truly hit home hardest for me: That fracturing of the idea of Home. The title of the book gives the game away. "No son of mine" is harsh, unforgiving, and stone-cold. Those are words I heard as well. They sever the taproot of family brutally and irreparably. The rest of one's life they resonate, drowning out the less-resonant words of lovingkindness one attracts. One day, if one is VERY lucky, a voice will say "I love you" in the exact canceling resonance to that thunderous rejection...and that good luck came to Author Corcoran, or I simply could not have borne to read or write about this book. I knew that going in, as I follow him on Facebook, so I was in no doubt that this would be the case. Even being uncertain of this facet of his present-day life would have rendered me unable to read the book, so strongly do I feel about it.
What made Author Corcoran write this memoir now is the pandemic just past. His mother died in the pandemic without the two of them being able to reach mutual forgiveness. That is an incalculable agony. Staying silent, not howling one's pain to the world, is just flat imposssible. Being a writer meant that he chose to make this hegira from belief, to education, to rejection, to sad, grieving acceptance of one's losses in words. His life today is a materially and emotionally better one, his loving partnership is a source of acceptance and self-worth support, it is in short a story of succeeding without forgetting his beginnings. What pleased me, as a reader, the most was the fact that I never once felt that he belittled or looked down on his mother, or the world he left behind; that is a spiritual generosity that I can but envy.
In his evocation of a life left behind, Author Corcoran leaves the reader with the sense that he looks on his mother and the life she led, the teachings she imparted, and the world she lived in as a chrysalis from which he emerged, not a trap from which he escaped.
That is the best gift a parent can receive from an adult child. I am deeply saddened that the author's mother is not alive to receive it.… (plus d'informations)