What Salmon Know

The most depressing stories in the world, yet you really connect with the characters and Reid makes you feel like you know them. The whole thing is highly reminiscent of Bukowski, but there's something less fatalistic and more positive about it. Maybe Reid's characters are Bukowski's characters when they were still young and had some hope; before they grew up and realized that life really is hell. The narration style is somewhat stylized and at times poetic, but it's not overdone and never goes over the reader's head, which is a good thing. Reid has an interesting way of ending his stories - he often ends them at a point where we don't know what's going to happen - and what he's trying to do here is get across that the protagonist of the story typically doesn't CARE what happens. The story is often never resolved, but this is realistic because stories in our real lives our often never resolved. Reid's characters, like Bukowski's and like the ones in Modest Mouse songs, just float through life, and whatever happens, happens.

I like reading Elwood Reid. His first novel, "If I Don't Six," was excellent. So are these stories. I am an MFA student myself, and I believe Reid was one, as well as being a college football player. His writing is unlike that of a lot of MFA students. He is clear, concise, and focuses on telling a good story. Gives vivid scenes, good action, and characters you feel for, rather than just read about. Reid is talented, and apparently, very persistent. I read it took him 10 years of dealing with rejections before GQ published his first piece, the short story that the book is titled after.

The first story was good... depressing, since I can relate but well written never-the-less. It just goes to show, no matter how much you give, they just want to keep taking. Makes you just want to leave it all and climb Mt. Everest or deal cards in Vegas or something...

Reid's protagonists - all male in 10 short stories - face lives that are gray and grim. These men work with both hands and drink the same way; they are dropouts, drones, down on their luck. (In the movies, they might be portrayed by Stephen Baldwin, Nicholas Cage or Michael Madsen.) Their names are Drew, Maynard or Craig, although like Brando in "Last Tango in Paris," they'd probably be better off with a grunt or a groan instead of a name. A key strength of Reid's narratives is their authentic voice and sound; these characters are not endowed with powers of observation or insight that belong more to a skillful writer than to Joe and Jane blue-collar. Reid is just out to tell a story, convincingly and consistently, as the men who are his characters would tell it: straight. He succeeds, with sincerity and passion. "What Salmon Know" is best read in one sitting as a tour de force, as one would read Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, a volume of Thom Jones or Reid's first book, the football roman a clef, "If I Don't Six" (Doubleday, 1998). Reid manages to write about blue-collar bozos, workers, grunts and freaks without romance or sentimentality, without false heroism or ideals and without judgment. One emerges from this collection convinced the author has been to these places, has taken the blows and has come out the other end, walking under his own power.