Basso Profundo: U of Iowa

Aldous Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Will Boast poses his own challenge to Huxley’s dictum with “Power Ballads,” a very impressive series of short stories set in the personal and business world of music. The pieces here portray much that goes unexpressed, like one musician’s ambition pitted against another’s inadequacy; like a wife’s devotion to her touring musician husband even as she rebels against it; and like the unforgiving bitterness that drives a man to sabotage a onetime friend’s big recording break.

These balanced, reverberant stories play their supremely effective magic in our imaginations and hearts – that this set of short stories won the Iowa Short Fiction Award tells us once again, as though any doubt existed, that they have an unerring eye for sterling short fiction over there in Iowa City.

Several of the stories feature Tim, a drummer getting started and making his way. This character’s stories flow in chronological order, and we get an early picture of the ambitious musician as a child in the first story, “Sitting In.” Tim’s ambitions get the better of some of the adult musicians, and one shows his fear and inadequacy in a pointed but ineffective act of vandalism. Tim hooks up with a group of aging rockers, onetime true guitar heroes, in the title story, and here Boast captures beautifully the sad yearning for past glory. In the finest Tim-piece, called “Dead Weight,” Tim plays in the studio for an up-and-coming pop phenomenon. The record company has paid off the band’s original drummer, and sent him home to Kansas, and recruited Tim to tour with the group. At the inevitable home-town concert appearance, the old drummer shows up backstage, much to Tim’s discomfort. After perfunctory pleasantries, Tim plays the concert, which that night proceeds with extra energy. At a climactic moment, Tim waves to the original band member to come out from the wings and play. The young doofus just smiles back at him, rocking to the music. He was never going to get out in front of twenty thousand people. Other pieces dealing with our drummer show his surprise and – relief? – when his engagement falls apart. The manic revenge he and another loser musician play on the cipher-like girlfriend captures the sad wayward course things always go in these people’s lives, and the ambiguity they feel at even the smallest effort to fight back.

The finest piece in this excellent group is “Mr. Fern, Freestyle.” A onetime edgy R&B bandleader finds himself leading an inner-city choir as middle age creeps ever closer. A few of his singers are a problem – sometimes they disrupt rehearsal, but mostly they want to rap together. This very gratifying story contains Mr. Fern’s slow transformation from bête noire to mentor, a balanced treatment of gang behavior, and the main character’s fully-nuanced background and development. It’s exceedingly well done.

That description applies to this entire collection. The prose is sturdy and uninvasive, the characters quite real whether they’re pathetic, greedy, or just trying to hold things together. I appreciated the advance copy from the U. of Iowa, because it treated me to a terrific writer with a unique point of view. I’m antsy to see what’s next from Will Boast.

The fragrant Hawaiian breezes blow through Barbara Hamby’s elegiac “Lester Higata’s 20th Century” like a gentle tidal flow, and they belie the sometimes fierce emotional ebbs and rushes that bedevil its characters. This is sumptuous, a delicious repast, a deserving award winner from the University of Iowa Press.

We witness several of Lester Higata’s life’s salient events in reverse order: we begin with 1999, the time of his death, and end up in 1946, when he falls in love while recuperating from war wounds suffered in Italy. Ms. Hamby has stitched together a series of stand-alone short pieces, à la “Olive Kitteredge,” to illuminate Lester’s life and times. She features Lester’s wife Katherine prominently, of course, along with his mother and father, and a few memorable neighbors, too. Each piece has a nearly impossible clarity while illuminating its weighty issues, and they lend themselves to the whole quilt beautifully. Ms. Hamby knows her subject intimately, and the emotional feel here is completely unerring. We have racial prejudice, greed, generational conflict, traditional vs. modern practices, xenophobia, and abuse issues all on display. But the feeling I take away is a quiet longing, a yearning for the islands, felt by one who grew up there and has been exiled.John Simmons Short Fiction Award at the University of Iowa. Well done!

But this longing never gets in the way of the plot or the characters. Lester fights for his country, sustains severe wounds, falls in love and marries, puts himself in harm’s way to protect a neighbor boy being chased down the street by a belt-wielding father, and on the eve of his death, jokes with his long-dead father about his insufferable mother. Characters recur story to story, of course, and if they’re lucky, they get a close treatment at Ms. Hamby’s deft hand.

Sometimes I search for a word to do justice to the flavor of a work, and the one that works here is “beguiling.” We rush from each short piece to the next, knowing we’ll reap another reward for our effort – and the anticipation is a chief delight. I applaud whoever bestows the