The Spot

Nobody has an easy time of it in David Means' short story collection, The Spot. An unemployed, on-the-edge father tries to cheer up his son with recycled Christmas presents while the boy is being tested for cystic fibrosis. A teenage girl escapes an abusive situation at home only to wind up working as a prostitute for a murderous ex-merchant marine. A divorced man is tormented as much by his memories as by the noises his upstairs neighbor makes. Means' authorial voice is both restless and breathless, given at times to an almost incantatory cadence. Whether he's telling the story of a cheating couple in New York City or the tales-within-tales shared among vagrants around a campfire that frame the collection, he continuously shifts points of view while turning a story's time line into a moebius strip. These stylistic traits are a liability more than a virtue unfortunately, as real moments of anguish or insight are too often buried beneath an excess of detail, repetition, and pinpoint analysis. However, scattered throughout the book and in the story "Nebraska" in particular—in which a woman with misgivings about her part in a bank heist improvises a new plan in the middle of it—style and content merge, and the effect is vividly enveloping. Means is a writer of unusual talent but The Spot is wildly uneven.