San Diego where “spinning ID tags seemed to wind…threateningly closer and closer to the necks around which they were hung,” conveying the narrator’s sense that he has been abruptly and forcibly returned to civilization. At the party, the narrator, estranged from his wife, tries to connect with his brother-in-law, a sculptor, even while attempting to figure out what went amiss in his failed marriage. The story closes with a pair of unforgettable images, one actual and one hardened in sculpture, that linger long after the page is turned.

"The Free-fall,” the book’s longest piece, has a novelistic rhythm and scope. The story traces Leen, a politician who aspires to a higher office, from a drunken car crash at the opening, through the series of incidents culminating in his being kidnapped and winding up in the thick of union riots. The story revolves around Minnesota politics, but stretches to examine the psychology of politician as actor, unable to believe inanything authentic, “hopelessly addicted to the improvised performance of spectacle.” Dedicated to Paul Wellstone, the story’s ambitions are admirable, but in its attempt to mix political themes with those of personal struggle, it seems to lose its way.

Yet overall, Amdhal’s book stays doggedly on track. In “Visigoth,” the hockey player gazes down from the press box, decrying how from that vantage point it all looks like an “endless repetition of a few basic patterns…[where] nobody…has any power.” In the end, the strength of this fine collection rests in how it stubbornly resists the “false and pernicious” safety of this distance; instead, his writing drags us out onto the ice to watch gorgeousness and ugliness collide, leaving their trail of blood and sequins time and time again.

 

—Tim Horvath

 

 

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