Carrying the Torch

by Brock Clarke

The stories in this collection occupy a world at once as familiar as a suburban backyard or a southern college’s hallowed football field and as strange as a man who buys Savannah, Georgia, and tries to turn it into the perfect Southern city as part of his attempt to win back his estranged wife. The fictional territory of Carrying the Torch, is in short, Brock Clarke’s, one in which the surreal and the hilarious share a neighborhood with the painfully real and the sweetly ironic. Here readers will encounter characters dislocated by work and love, by huge losses and life’s small dramas, men and women who have migrated South in search of redemption—or at least in the hope of leaving the worst behind. In these tales about what people try to leave and find they can’t, about the lies we tell the people we love and the myths we create to make life livable, Marly Swick cites an “exceptional originality” as well as an “amazing emotional resonance, a haunting quality.” “Notable for their balance of sentiment and restraint, the music of their language, and the haunting human longing that coexists with the irony and the humor,” as Lee Martin remarks, these remarkable stories carry forward a tradition reaching from Flannery O’Connor to John Cheever and Donald Barthelme—and arrive at a brilliance all their own.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

186 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently a collection of short stories, The Price of the Haircut. His novels include The Happiest People in the World, Exley (which was a Kirkus Book of the Year, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and a longlist finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (which was a national bestseller, and American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, a #1 Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices in Fiction selection, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.

Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Clarke lives in Portland, Maine and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in The University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Djrmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew Brock Clarke was a better writer than one would think from reading An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England! This collection of short stories shows that Clarke can allow his characters to be the stars of their own stories and not force them into contrived situations that might be best seller fodder but isn't all that interesting. In every one of these stories we are exposed to unhappy people who either are trying to fix their unhappiness or, in the case of my favorite story, "The Son's Point of View", accepting their situation and dragging others into it. The quick fix, almost happy endings of some of the stories weaken their power, but I'm convinced that eventually Clarke will lett all of his characters loose, no matter how it turns out. Also, whether it was an attempt to link the stories or simply Clarke's writing style, the similar names and professions of characters from one story to another makes reading this collection straight through a little confusing. Those small problems aside, this is a wonderful start for a writer I hope to read a great deal more.

[Sean Cooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brock Clarke teaches creative writing in my hometown of Cincinnati at UC. I read about him in Citybeat, our local entertainment magazine, and he's become one of those random discoveries I love to share with my friends. I read his first short story collection, What We Won't Do, and his novel, The Ordinary White Boy. They we both great, but this collection of short stories is even better.

Clarke's view of the world is skeptical and self-deprecating. He paints characters (who surely echo himself) who either try to see or create more deep meaning in their worlds than is really there. The results are, naturally, disillusioning, but the themes often lie in the more obvious aspects of their lives they've ignored. Stories that seem like downers at first might almost seem uplifting upon reflection.

[Marvin]

Good bit of divorce, relationship failure. The title story's character vowing to rip off her cheating husband's penis; the themed parties of "The Reason Was Us"; The Catholic- and economic-survivors of "The Apology"; the put-upon husband/son/brother keeping secrets through his family's getaway to their summer cabin; the dim college-football benchwarmer of "Geronimo"; and the "The Swimmer"-esque house-to-house dancing of "The Fund-Raiser's Dance Card."

[Ginger ♥ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting series of short stories. The beginning story is one of my favorites, but they all bring something to the book in it's entirety. Every story had a humorous sorrow to it about lives torn apart told in some strangely-humored way. It was an enjoyable book for me despite the strange combination of moods.

[Lorie Kleiner Eckert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy was my creative writing professor at UC. Many of these stories touch upon infidelity and the loss of a child making me wonder what's up in this guy's real life. It makes me more sympathetic to him than I was when I was in his class and found him so hard to deal with...

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Clarke's story "The Apology" in the Pushcart Prize anthology and loved it so much I had to get the collection. "The Apology" is still one of my favorite stories of all time, and the rest of the book is funny, sad, unsentimental, and deeply affecting.

[Yeti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any collection of short stories that opens with the image of a severed male appendage being transported around a suburban neighborhood as though it were the Olympic torch (hence the title) is definitely a must read. At times humorous, satirical and grotesque.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are funny, sometimes surreal stories of suburban alienation, in the vein of A.M. Homes or Wells Tower. David Gates (who compared Clarke to a contemporary Cheever) and George Singleton wrote the cover blurbs--very appropriate.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious/novel (in the newness of it, not the form)

[Stephanie]

I love short stories, and Brock Clarke is a fine practitioner of the form. His stories are funny, somewhat loopy. People living in the shadow and substance of academia are his subjects.