The Peripatetic Coffin

Starred review from April 22, 2013
Rutherford’s sharp, inspired debut collection runs the gamut of emotion and genre, blending laughter and misery, reality and fantasy, in eight tales that ponder the methods in which humans achieve isolation. While many of these methods take the form of physical vessels—the Civil War-era submarine in the title story, the Russian ship headed toward the North Pole in “The Saint Anna,” a futuristic shipper-tank named Halcyon roaming the desert for dying prey in “Dirwhals!”—the author also fashions narratives focusing on psychological, corporeal seclusion. In “A Mugging,” a marriage slowly erodes after a violent robbery, and the nostalgically beautiful “Summer Boys” recounts a devoted childhood friendship that unfolds over the long, meandering days of summer vacation. Children find themselves in a different kind of summer story in “Camp Winnesaka,” a darkly comic, battle-ravaged tale of sleepover camp vs. sleepover camp that doubles as a sly commentary on the Iraq War. And though Rutherford (who appeared in Best American Short Stories 2009) dips into related thematic waters in nearly all of his narratives, the feeling of repetition never surfaces. These are robust, engaging stories. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company.

March 15, 2013
A debut collection of eight stories that run the literary gamut, from seafaring parables to domestic realism, with the quality of the stories varying as well. The opening, title story relates the adventures of "the first underwater vessel commissioned for combat by the Confederate State of America," a Civil War submarine "that has failed--spectacularly--almost every meaningful test it has been given...the underwater equivalent of a bicycle strapped to a bomb with the intention of pedaling it four miles through hostile waters to engage an infinitely better equipped enemy...." "The Saint Anna" offers another unlikely seafaring tale about a ship ice-bound in the Arctic during the last gasps of czarist Russian rule, leaving those onboard split over whether to stay with the ship, where they've been trapped for a couple of years, or try to walk to wherever on the ice: "Each group is conscious of what abandonment means: they are leaving us to our death and we are letting them walk to theirs." Like a Beckett fable of nothingness and bleak faith, the story suggests that "[t]here's no explanation of what's happening to us except that it's happening." The final story, "Dirwhals!," replaces endless ice with endless sand, and unbearable cold with unbearable heat, in its diary of a man who has fled his family and abandoned his sister to serve on "a slow moving factory, an ungainly vessel that serves as both a hunting ship and a one-stop bio-processing plant," as if Melville's Ishmael has found himself sandlocked. Amid stories that inhabit parallel dimensions of history, in a geography of the imagination, many of the rest are contemporary family realism, often involving a boy of the same generation as the author undergoing some sort of rite of passage. In "Camp Winnesaka," a battle between rival summer camps escalates into rockets and casualties, with a subtext that evokes Weapons of Mass Destruction. The longest story, "John, For Christmas," is the most melodramatic, as a troubled adult son exposes the strains in his parents' seemingly strong marriage. The author seems well-read, and he aspires to the highest literary standards, but some of these stories seem more significant in their inspiration than their execution.

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May 1, 2013
Many of the eight stories in Rutherford's first collection explore risk taking and the way men and boys deal with risk by facing it, provoking it, or running from it. Rutherford's mastery of setting and world building lends these stories tangible reality, while lyrical, character-appropriate language adds authenticity to the compulsively readable plots. Rutherford's greatest strength resides in the sweetness and strength of his characters, who face up to loss, misfortune, and heartbreak with courage and a weird kind of humor that makes these stories both resonant and rereadable. The Peripatetic Coffin, set at the end of the Civil War, features the crew of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley as they torpedo the USS Housatonic, hoping to break the blockade of Charleston harbor. The haunting Summer Boys, set in the mid-1980s, describes the ups and downs of two boys' friendship, including their unexpressed emotions and unspoken, fierce devotion. In Dirwhals, journal entries describe the actions of a crew on the hunt for endangered animals in a postapocalyptic world. Libraries will find this a great addition to short story collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)