Book covers true grit (with Rust Belt style)
Much has been made of judging books by their covers. When I first laid eyes on “The Dogs of Detroit” by Brad Felver, winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, I felt a sense of cold and endless descent down neatly chiseled stone steps wrapping into darkness.
There was an allure to this abyss presented on the dust jacket. It was no surprise then that this debut collection of 14 stories is a persistent tear through some of our most human experiences and qualities: resilience, loss, longing, conflict and violence. And this tear is triumphant. Like the steps on the cover, Mr. Felver lays his words down in these stories in such a precise way that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to pull yourself away from a story once you’ve started.
Mr. Felver’s wordsmithing doesn’t wait to present itself. Early in the opening story, “Queen Elizabeth,” we are introduced to two characters on a first date who might seem somewhat incompatible on paper: Ruth, a talkative doctoral candidate in applied mathematics at Case Western Reserve, and Gus, a much shyer craftsman and furniture maker.
Their courtship opens on a scene at a restaurant where Ruth is discussing her research into probability theory, with Gus doing his best to follow along. “‘I doubt I can even spell stochastic,’ he said, ‘but I love listening to you talk about it.’ The only fancy bit of math he knew was about Euclidean planes requiring three points, and this only because he felt strongly that all desks — all tables of any kind — should have only three legs. Two legs could not balance a load, but four created wobbles. Three created a perfect Euclidean plane.” I loved this story, these characters and how the details of their personalities cast long, allegorical shadows over events to unfold later on.
Mr. Felver’s writing also hooked me at a very important point for any story: the first line. There are several quality first lines throughout the collection, but two of my favorites are the ones that open “Unicorn Stew” (“Bev and me, we’re cooking up some unicorn stew in a trashcan and punching each other”) and “In the Walls” (“Frank and me, we can hang some goddamn drywall”). While it was tempting at times to jump around
“THE DOGS OF DETROIT: STORIES” By Brad Felver University of Pittsburgh Press ($21.95)
from story to story, there was no escaping the next tale once I’d seen its opening line. Not many books can do that for me. “The Dogs of Detroit” did it time and again.
Pittsburgh readers will immediately notice the Rust Belt themes that are the DNA to so much of the setting and characters of these stories. From rural Ohio to urban Detroit, these stories are cut from the same cloth of our own city’s making, and caked with all levels of detail that any longtime Pittsburgher would find resonant. For me, what was most absorbing was the onslaught of obstacles thrown in the way of all the characters, but also the various levels of grit and resilience they took to persevere. This attribute, the desire and need to push through the bad times courses through our region, be it in our sports, our work or our neighborhoods. To see this spirit elevated, celebrated and dealt with so expertly in “The Dogs of Detroit” made it all the more enjoyable.
The eponymous story ends the collection with a kid chasing dogs (both a reality and a metaphor) through Detroit, but with the much larger significance around the disappearance of his mother complicating his drive to hunt them. His father is at his wits’ end with his behavior, and there is violence between them. As there is in several other stories, there’s an impasse neither can get through, which is another flavor springing up in much of the collection. This final story refuses to end where you want it to, and I loved that as a finale to the book. It’s a reminder that good storytelling sometimes withholds the stuff of our expectations and forces us to look back again at the story we’ve been given to find what’s valuable within it.
And that’s the word for “The Dogs of Detroit” — valuable. This book is full of stories that speak to me as an ordinary person and my experiences. This book will do the same for other readers. There is hope and value in all the gritty, passionate, difficult storytelling that Brad Felver delivers.
Brad Felver will read from “The Dogs of Detroit” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at City of Asylum on the North Side. The program, which also features this year’s Drue Heinz selecting judge Lynne Sharon Schwartz, is free and open to the public.
Cameron Barnett is author of “The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water,” which was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.