The Weatherman

(Clint McCown read as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series--along with Betsy Sholl & Estha Weiner) on March 30, 2007. This is from my introduction to the event). Clint McCown writes like people speak, never relying on colloquialisms or clichés to get across a sense of personality and place, getting the particulars of his characters down with subtle variations, an easy turn of a memorable phrase, and a clear connection between how people communicate with others, with the world, and within themselves. There's the casual cruelty--some say brute honesty--with which some people speak with their familiars, family or not. He creates scenes filled with black humor and lines so laugh out-loud hilarious they beg to be shared immediately with others--who surely will be wondering why you're bursting into laughter on the train--but one must resist, if only to allow other readers to come across them fresh, and explosions of vivid yet never gratuitous violence, or at least the ever-tangible threat of it. He also never lets go of the slight sense of the surreal and ridiculous, like a character being "saved," in the religious sense, at a drive-in, and how you can hear the stunned tone in the voice of the person hearing this news. And out of pain and ruin, he writes memorable lines like "The body would fall away, but the mind would stay clear, a mute prisoner in am ever-diminishing jailhouse," about as perfect an evocation of the ravages of physical illness as there can be. In his low-key way, there's also an unmistakable belief in the importance of how people treat each other; Clint's characters surprise with kindness and steadfastness, or disappoint with pettiness, corruption and arrogance. In any event, they are believable and memorable, and make spending any time with them, no matter their faults or foibles, a genuine, well-rounded pleasure. In "The Weatherman," he writes about how the phases of the moon are "form without substance." His work is anything but.