Reviews
Afflicted and flawed, the male protagonists--blue collar but well read--of Timothy A. Westmoreland's impressive debut collection, Good as Any, all suffer quietly their own degenerative or chronic ailments, which parallel or are seemingly a manifestation of their emotional shortcomings and loneliness. Hope, here, is not an option. Westmoreland's prose is sparse and exacting, with promising insights. In these stories, a man "walked into novels as if they were rooms in his own home," and "[a] fish is like a good idea. You have to know what to do with it or it's wasted." With each story involving illness and dying, Westmoreland notes that "[e]veryone learns in time, when it comes to illness, that compromise is really only a process of letting go."The most powerful work is "They Have Numbered All My Bones," in which a man, hovering in the gray area near consciousness following a car accident, recalls his one, true love long ago; nearly as impressive is the title story, which depicts a tired relationship ended when a man adopts a terminally ill dog and gives himself over to his pet at his girlfriend's expense. Despite the fact that most stories end on a rather unresolved note, there is a compassion and earnestness throughout the book that, while it may be somewhat depressing for some, forces introspection over difficult terrain. Good as Any is an important new collection., This bleak, powerful collection of eight short stories chronicles the lives of diseased and depressed men and women trying to make their way through an unsympathetic world. Though Westmoreland's spare, elegant and highly textural prose provides some relief, the sadness that permeates almost every one of these stories can be overwhelming. The writer captures his characters' wrenching existences in precise detail, and the aftertaste is rarely one of hope. Among the strongest offerings is the poignant "They Have Numbered All My Bones," about a lonely man recalling lost love while on his deathbed following a car crash. Also of note are several entries in which diabetes darkens and distorts the lives of the main characters. A lifetime of fighting the disease has so numbed the emotions of a young man in "The Buried Boy" that he ignores the pleas of a teenager drowning on the beach. "Blood Knot" tracks the sudden disintegration of a middle-aged man who slips into diabetic delirium while on a fly-fishing trip. The collection's title story offers the only trace of levity, capturing moments of dark humor and tenderness as a man tries to save the life of his beloved dog. Despite the collection's strengths, many of the stories suffer from endings that are unnecessarily oblique, and Westmoreland's prose at times strains under the weight of sensory overload. Both problems mar the otherwise exceptional novella-length "Winter Island," which describes how economic and social pressures set the peculiar inhabitants of a remote New England valley against each other. For readers not discouraged by unrelenting woe, Westmoreland's fiction debut offers many incisive observations about life, suffering and death. Agent, Anna Ghosh. 7-city author tour.
