Fat Time and Other Stories

April 17, 2023
Allen (Rails Under My Back) offers an arresting collection featuring surreal situations along with riffs on the lives of famous Black men. A misty atmosphere pervades the proceedings. The opener, “Testimonial (Supported in Belief/Verified in Fact),” reads like a tall tale, following a man trying to save his son from a lynch mob by hiding the boy inside a cow’s anus. In the title story, Allen imagines an alternate history in which boxer Jack Johnson’s first filmed fight against Tommy Burns becomes a duel to the death. Miles Davis narrates a troubled relationship with a new guitarist in “Pinocchio.” Allen renders the bandleader’s voice with welcome wit and acidity, though he’s less successful with Jimi Hendrix, the star of “Heads,” a plodding misfire that lends little imagination to the revolutionary guitarist’s inner life and leans heavily on descriptions of Hendrix drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and staring out the window. Though some entries stumble, the author provokes with riveting images, dark humor, and a chilling sense of desperation. When Allen is on, he’s a force to be reckoned with.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of "Black Experience." Allen is both a poet and novelist whose prose reverberates with colorful imagery and crystalline lyricism. In his new story collection, he shows greater assurance with plotting and characterization, which only bolsters his agile imagination. In a few pages at a time, Allen can endow even the ghosts of dead children, as in "Four Girls," with vibrant, combustible, and poignant personalities. In similar fashion, he can persuasively envision real-life personages from the recent past, as in "Heads," which has rock god Jimi Hendrix hanging out with British painter Francis Bacon somewhere around the disquieting hinge of the 1960s and '70s, each man reaching for his own transcendence through distortions of time and space. And speaking of space: In "Orbits," Allen reimagines the near conclusion of Muhammad Ali's boxing career on a planet Earth with �migr�s from the moon helping him prepare for his 1980 bout against Larry Holmes. Other prominent Black men include Jack Johnson, the Ali of his era, who's tearing through Australia ("Fat Time"), and Miles Davis, gloomily huddled in his Manhattan apartment ("Pinocchio"). Not all of Allen's characters are famous; "Big Ugly Baby" chronicles the yearslong erotic intimacies between two at-risk teen boys, while in "Fornication Camp," couples gather at an Illinois religious retreat in a villa moved from Italy and reconstructed piece by piece by Abraham Lincoln. The range of subject matter and the ingenuity of the storylines draw readers in, but it's Allen's intricately poetic language that keeps them there, as when he describes Hendrix noodling on his guitar and how he "knows how to worry chords into the black shape of time. Knows how to anchor weight on a string and sink a barbed note into the muddy depths below, then bend that string and yank up a struggling catfish." The whole collection hums and throbs with such startling craft. A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.

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June 1, 2023
Allen (Song of the Shank, 2014) returns with an absorbing, genre-blending collection of stories. From the folktale-style opening piece, in which a father smuggles his newborn child inside a cow to protect him, readers are eased into the original, evocative worlds of each story. The mixture of the speculative with the realistic is successful, and the strongest stories place real historical figures in alternate histories. The titular story reimagines a different outcome for world-famous boxer Jack Johnson and his real-life fight to become the first Black heavyweight champion. The clarity and strength of the voices of these characters is exceptional. Throughout the stories, the prose is lyrical with surprising, vivid detail, such as "the moon wide and spreading across the sky like batter in a hot skillet," artistry that is constant, irrespective of each story's genre. There is an expansiveness to this gathering of short fiction as alongside these inventively fictionalized histories are quieter but no less impactful stories that examine grief, community, and the inextricable link between the past and the present. For fans of John Edgar Wideman.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.