“The fifth of July, they went down to the river, RL and June, sat on the rocks with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and talked about Taylor. The fifth of July was Taylor’s birthday and they did this every year. He would have been fifty. RL had been his boyhood friend and June was married to him. He’d been dead eleven years.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUL 6, 2010)

Kevin Canty writes with a spare beauty. The book is designed so that there is a lot of white space on the pages and this space carries meaning. Everything is about people who are lost, looking for love, recovering from poor choices and yet have a resiliency that carries them through their damaged lives with strength and a certain dignity. Canty’s characters are able to tell us as much about themselves in their silences as when they speak.

The characters that comprise this novel overlap, and each chapter is primarily about one or two of the characters. There is RL, owner of a bait, tackle and guiding shop who has not had a loving relationship in years. He is a big man – in girth, spirit and appetites. He likes his booze and he wishes desperately for a woman. He was married for a while to a Dead Head who followed the Grateful Dead for years, leaving him to raise their daughter, Layla, on his own. Layla gives meaning to his life. She is nineteen years old and a college student. When not at school, she spends her summers in the Montana wilderness with RL where most of this novel takes place. Layla is recovering from a love affair gone amiss. RL realizes that Layla is not likely to be with him for much longer. He is trying to learn how to let her go.

RL decides to take in an old lover of his who is having chemotherapy for melanoma. In the back of his mind he hopes to resurrect some sort of relationship with her despite the fact that she is married. Betsy helps give some meaning to RL’s life because, with Layla in college, he faces the empty nest syndrome. With his big heart, he needs to give. However, with his huge appetites, he also expects a lot from others.

June is a close friend of RL’s. She was married to RL’s best friend who died eleven years ago. As the book begins, June decides to give up her widowhood. Her husband, Taylor, was her great love but now she wants another love. Eleven years of grieving is a long time. On top of that, she is a hospice worker, spending her days with the nearly dead.

Edgar is RL’s employee, an artist and lover of fishing. He knows fish and feels at one with the trout that inhabit the rivers of Montana. He is married with one child and another on the way. He is trying to make some difficult decisions in his life.

Canty has an inimitable sense of place. The reader feels like the Montana mountains are looming. I felt the lushness of the land, along with the hard life the inhabitants face. This is not a land for the weak but it can be a land for the lost – an end of the road place where people depend on one another. There is a lot of alcohol consumption in the book but there is rarely a mention of television or movies. Despite the loneliness of all the characters, they depend on one another for sustenance.

The characters speak to us in what they don’t say as much as what they tell us. This is a book about everything that makes us human – love, work, life, money, pain, joy, loneliness and connection. Canty gets it. His characters run the gamut of the soul. They are not sweet, nor are they urbanized. I pictured them in Carrhartts and jeans, rubber boots and down parkas. I felt their hands get cold and traveled with them on the dirt roads that were slick with mud or snow. I felt their pain and I soared with them in those rare moments of joy. It takes a fine author to take me to the depths of despair and soar the height of joy with his characters.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kevin Canty
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Where the Money Went

Bibliography:

• Below Zero (1999)
• A Stranger in the World: Stories (1994)
• Honeymoon and Other Stories (2001)
• Into the Great Wide Open (1996)
• Winslow in Love (2005)
• Where the Money Went: Stories (July 2009)
• Everything (July 2010)

“. . . in that moment I feel that everyone in the world is inside and I am out alone; that everyone is warm and safe, that circle of love is closed and everyone else inside and me out in the dark. That’s what I feel.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (OCT 2, 2009)

I first fell under Kevin Canty’s spell after reading Winslow in Love. Since then, I’ve read everything he writes.

His newest book, Where the Money Went, is a collection of nine short stories. Almost all of them are about damaged people, the precariousness of life and happiness, what it feels like to be dispossessed, lonely or disenfranchised, and the role that alcohol plays in people’s lives.

My favorite story in the collection, by far, is “No Place in This World for You.”  It is about a couple that has a little boy who bites. The boy bites rarely, but for reasons. As the story opens he has just been expelled from his day care program for biting. Neither parent can get a handle on their son or his biting. Mom is more interested in keeping in shape and exercising, not wanting to spend time with her son. Dad is a realtor who takes his son with him when he goes to show houses, setting him up with his own videos in a back room.

The collection starts off with “Where the Money Went,” a very short story about the dissolution of a marriage. The husband is looking back at his marriage with anger and wondering where all the money went.  “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is about two brothers who see each other for the first time following a terrible car accident that occurred about two months previously. One of the brothers was driving and escaped the accident uninjured. The other brother has been injured terribly and has spent the time since the accident in a nursing home.

In “In the Burn,” a young boy finds a dog in a burnt forest where his mother’s boyfriend works. His mother and her boyfriend are splitting up and the young boy feels lost and alone.  “They were Expendable” is a powerful story about a man who has been grieving the death of his love for the last year. He gradually tries to enter the world of the living and connect with others. Themes of the other stories encompass loneliness, alienation, secrets in marriage and lost people. In “The Boreal Forest,” Canty uses secrets in a marriage as a metaphor for the unknown and frightening occurrences in the natural world.

Canty’s stories are often metaphorical or allegorical, laying out situations that appear simple at first but are frequently deeper and more complex than what they first appear to be. I especially appreciate the way that Canty creates situations primarily through dialogue and almost always from the male point of view. His stories are not happy ones, nor are they light. However, they are filled with the stuff of life, often the unhappy stuff. Despite unhappiness and challenges, the human spirit usually prevails.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (July 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE:	Where the Money Went
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kevin Canty
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Everything More short stories: The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy The Species Crown by Curtis Smith Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

Bibliography:

• Below Zero (1999)
• A Stranger in the World: Stories (1994)
• Honeymoon and Other Stories (2001)
• Into the Great Wide Open (1996)
• Winslow in Love (2005)
• Where the Money Went: Stories (July 2009)
• Everything (July 2010)