Gary Amdahl
Milkweed, 2006, 212 pp., $15.95 (paperback)
The historical Visigoths were a Germanic tribe infamous for raiding villages and disturbing the Pax Romana. In Gary Amdahl’s collection, which won the 2006 Milkweed Fiction Prize, the Visigoths aren’t marauding pillagers; rather, they are contemporary American males, roaming about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Minnesota, and the traffic-saturated hills of Northern California. Like their namesakes, however, these men are driven by rage, in the modern case resulting from fractured relationships, inhospitable environs, and mostly, the general sense that their lives are perpetually out of control. Such characters will strike a familiar chord for fans of works such as Richard Ford’s Rock Springs. As in Ford’s early work, a typical Amdahl protagonist is a man who directs his rage inward to the point that it recoils and flares up as action, usually more destructive to himself than the ostensible target.
But these characters refuse any reduction to some template of self-flagellating American masculinity. Though they may introduce themselves as hockey players and bouncers and wrestlers and sled-dog drivers, they are as apt to drop an allusion to Hippolyta and Art Deco, to Appollinaire’s Surrealist “Les mamelles des Tiresias,” as to drop another person. The sled-dog driver lies offhandedly to none other than Arthur Miller at a party, claiming, to impress a woman, that he once played Happy and Biff on alternate nights. The hockey player, though he may commit a Jeff Gillooly-like attack on a figure skater, is dating a poetry professor, and via her becomes familiar with Blake and Shakespeare. In “The Volunteer,” Bill, a volunteer hockey coach, “dreamed vaguely of a hard-drinking cocktail party lifestyle he’d never actually been privy to,” citing Cheever