Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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One of the hockchoppers spotted it first, and when he did, he let everyone know it by cutting loose with a long, obnoxious battle howl. Take Matthew, the narrator in “Retreat,” a thrice-married real-estate developer who has “lived and profited in nine American cities” and just recently bought a small mountain in Maine. Their aggression is not so much willed as impelled, and while the pioneer at least creates something—a cabin, then a town—before leaving it all behind, Matthew, Jacey, and the rest only tear things down.

He chopped and chopped, and when he’d chopped all they had, he started chopping the chopped-up ones over again. I first read his story 'Raw Water' in 'The Best American Short Stories 2010' (originally published in McSweeney's) which isn't included in this collection. Djarf had been fighting his way up the Rhine Valley, making steady progress through a half-assed citizens’ militia of children and farmers, when the slaves closed in behind him. Mostly guy stories, but a few from different POVs, too, like the teen girl who vents her anger at a cousin who steals her squeeze by striking up a conversation with some drifter who is sunning himself shirtless on a rock in the stream out in the woods (it's Whatever O'Clock. What I realized is that every line of dialogue in that movie, each shot, everything that happens, is either just a little or widely off what you're expecting.

In Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis —that classic essay on the origins of American republicanism—the historian pauses over a description of what happens to the pioneer when civilization catches up to him. I went over and clamped one hand over Djarf’s mouth and pinched his nose shut with the other, and after a while he started to cool down.

We could see a man making his way toward a clump of white-walled cottages, his donkey loping along behind him with a load.

Even with the comedy – a face is described “like a left-handed sketch” – there is an emotional sincerity to the work.