Good Rockin' Tonight

Better known for his Broadway credits ("Big River"), author Hauptman has written in this collection a brace of Reagan-era stories set variously in Texas, Manhattan, Wyoming, Arizona, and California. Three of the stories are broadly comical, including the title story, about an Elvis impersonator, and another ("Hands Across America") about a north Texas family participating gamely in that long-forgotten benevolent event. Meanwhile, "Boom Town" follows two Texans to roughnecking jobs in Gillette, Wyoming, where they attempt to cut costs by living in an open field. The rest of the stories are edgier and darker, typically about young men in difficult or nonexistent relationships with women, and drifting, unemployed, or otherwise in a slow dance with disaster. A long-haired railway man takes up stormchasing and spends a hair-raising day in dangerous pursuit of funnel clouds ("Stormchaser"). Another is drawn to hang gliding at the wrong time in his life, by a friend who works as a movie stuntman. A newly-divorced, broke, and down-on-his-luck actor in New York struggles to preserve his dignity by being a conscientious father to his three-year-old daughter ("Moonwalking"). There are two memory pieces, one about a gifted geologist father unable to prevent a dark willfulness from ruining a successful career ("The Desert"). Another hints at the coming crash after the hallucinogenic highs of a group of idealistic, blissed out, and not so bright Haight-Ashbury hippies ("Kosmic Blues"). From a certain distance these are all comic stories, but many end ominously with sudden storms, a lightning bolt, a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert, or the passing of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart. The characters are often pathetic in their self-delusions while wringing at the same time some sympathy from us for the limited resources that have left them ill equipped and unprepared for misfortune. Out of print, but well worth finding a copy. Also recommended: Dave Hickey, "Prior Convictions" and Larry McMurtry's anthology, "Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West, 1950-the Present."