Vintage Lopez

Stories are told to entertain and/or enlighten. His formulation makes it seems as if art is some sort of laxative. He also subscribes to the rather noxious idea that art is about truth, and that there exists some sort of sacred trust, or the like, between writers and readers, when all an artist owes his audience is always attempting his best. Yet, this sort of creping insipidity is not the bulk of his prose, nor even more than an occasional weak moment, or brain fart. The best of his essays is also the longest, Flight, which sees Lopez tagging along with often odd commercial cargo deliveries on Boeing 747s as they jet about the planet. The descriptions of nature, time, flying, and the human condition's off-kiltering, due to these factors, evokes the best of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Eiseley. Yet, Lopez's poetry comes from sentence structure within paragraphs, not a heightened sense of word deployment. His fiction is almost essay-like, too. In fact, most of the pieces might properly be deemed `fictive essays' rather than short stories. The first story, The Entreaty Of The Wiideema, exemplifies this, as it follows a sociologist through his telling of his tale with a fictive Australian tribe. The worst tale is a story of two horny South American saints who were lovers, The Letters Of Heaven. It simply is a nice idea that really goes nowhere, save for a son's realization that he must carry on the family tradition of protecting the `blasphemous' letters from the vicious Roman Catholic Church. The last story, The Mappist, is a classic the equal of all but the very best of an Eiseley, and far above other likeminded souls like Edward Abbey. It is about the quest of a man obsessed with some travel books he found as a youth, who eventually tracks down its elusive author, Corlis Benefideo. To say more would be unfair to your enjoyment of it- but it is well-constructed, filled with memorable lines, moments, and images, and ends with insight, and poetry. I highly recommend this book to anyone, and will, when my daunting pile of `To Read' books shrinks, be getting the assorted books these essays and stories were selected from. Such motivation is the real bond between artist and audience any artist can assent to!