Love and Death and Nothing But
John Dufresne’s Johnny Too Bad Is All the Stories We Live

It’s 'trashus maximus,' smartened-up and made lean.

John Dufresne has a new book of short stories out.

By John Hood

The title alone was enough to strike me wise. Keenly mean. Like some fist you wished was just a bit smarter before it welted your tomorrow. Besides, it could be the story of my so-called life. One of those lives anyway. Back when the meaty knuckles of my own soul decided to floor me.

The book’s called Johnny Too Bad, and it will not save your life.

It might make you ice a big chunk of it, though, and relive, in swelling detail, all the high-lows you can stomach, providing of course you’ve stomach enough to swing the high-low.

But John Dufresne’s Johnny Too Bad is not about you, or about me. It’s about us, and all the stories we live. Love and Death, dig?

Set in a solaced South Florida and centered by a story of the same name, JTB has the sink of some of Richard Ford’s trailer-parked shorts. Barbies and Bigfeet and Big Wheels and a “Hottie” who’s got news of a hurricane named Fritzy compete with miracle cures and crazy uncles who spit in the face of the Church. Told in the deep glancing blows Dufresne, who teaches creative writing at Florida International University, has deemed “abb-fic” (abbreviated fiction), it’s trashus maximus, smartened-up and made lean.

And precisioned. Here rides nuance, in all its bruising candor. Simple, sinuous summations of love lost (There was a time when I wouldn’t let [her] out of my sight, now I’m not even sure what she looks like.); ways of seeing (Look, and you are fixed in time and space. Stare, and time dissolves.); truth (If I made it up, you’d have believed it.); and talk (With speech there’s no time to see what you say until it’s too late.).

That the antagonizing protagonist of the titular tale seems to be better in tune with his dog Spot than he is with his women, let alone himself, only makes the musings that much more amusing — and potent.

But this is a book of stories, and JTB plurals with pummeling aplomb. “I Will Eat a Piece of the Roof and You Can Eat the Window” breaks your heart; “You’re at Macy’s, Killing Time When It Hits You” breaks your soul, and “Who Are They Who Are Like Clouds” breaks your head, or at least stabs it into omission.

Still, it’s less the touching tabloidery of modern life and more the touch and the feel of life itself that gets you. Reading Dufresne you are there, in and of the stories, and you tear and you bleed all the same. It’s the kinda pain that hurts so much it causes people to hit hard enough to break an elbow. Nothing short of the break and the blow and the burn of Love and Death.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com. Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.