Rear View: Stories

By Pete Duval

With uncanny insight and deadpan humor, the twelve stories in Pete Duval's debut collection feature night shift workers, lapsed Catholics, bullies, and smalltime thieves struggling with their jobs,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618441409
• ISBN13: 9780618441402
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 151 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Wise, Funny, Humane

Pete Duval's Rear View is a collection of twelve stories that are astonishing and wonderful in their wit, brilliance, and toughness. Wise and leavened by humor, these stories show us how darkly impossible everyday life can be-and how we manage to live it anyway in the company of all our flaws and limitations. What touched me most deeply was Duval's treatment of his male characters, who are burdened by society's expectations on behalf of us all. These characters expect themselves live up to ideals of manliness and responsibility as they try to deal with bullies ("Bakery," "Scissors"), bear with sick parents ("Midnight Mass," "Wheatback"), protest injustice ("Cellular"), absorb marriage and aging ("Impala," "Rear View"), speak rationality to madness ("Spectator Sport"), conserve their integrity ("Something Like Shame"), midwife one another into a violent world ("Fun with Mammals"), or simply survive ("Welcome Wagon"). Reality is always an ambush in the dark, though. In Duval's masterful hands, these characters win our respect, our understanding, and finally our empathy for not being perfect. They are like us. They are doing their best. The ultimate struggle is to forgive oneself ("Pious Object"). None of us sign up as children for these life ordeals, but we meet them anyway. In my favorite story, "Bakery," the decent main character Gus meets his nemesis in the bully Red, who wears Gus down to a nub of physical outrage. Afterwards, Gus discovers his own childhood school desk in the dark attic: With his good hand, he pulled the desk into the center of the floor and turned it to face north, the darkest part of the sky. The lights of New Bedford glimmered across the river. He wedged himself into the chair. Creaking with his weight, it felt small and wobbly underneath him. (84)

Fantastic Decription + Peculiar Plots = Excellent Stories

Pete Duval's writing and descriptive style remind me of Raymond Carver, but Duval's sense of humor, (in Fun With Mammals - a tribe of guys are transporting a stolen narwhal in the back of a flatbed, and the narwhal gives birth to...you have to read the story, but it's thoroughly bizarre and excellent)compassion, and generousity put him on a plane of his own. Each story holds a spotlight up to the daily revelations and disappointments that both keep us going and drive us down. Duval's characters are ordinary people in the grip of universal emotion. As you watch them moved by forces beyond their control, and sometimes accepting the inexplicable (Cellular has a talking whippet named Tex, who speaks regularly to the narrator) you end up pretty damn moved yourself. And pained. Spectator Sport - a story about a college kid volunteering at a mental hospital, and getting involved in competition with the patients, ("I volunteered to visit insane people at a mental hospital. I was in college. I thought it might be fun." is a perfect example. Read this book.

Flash Fiction at it's Finest

Pete Duval has fine-tuned each story in Rear View to reveal the gristly, meaty bits of life. His stories are refreshingly concise and concentrated. Duval does not waste words, and that is an admirable trait in contemporary fiction. His paradoxial themes on religion and the working class make for orignal, highly intriguing stories. I highly recommend this collection.

Duval's masterful text

I just finished Peter Duval's Rear View; it was one of the most remarkable books I've had the pleasure to hold in my hands. Growing as part of the bustle of blue collar New England, I felt an incredible emotional connection to the characters in Duval's stories. Everyone who grows up in a neighborhood like mine knows a dozen characters like the major players in the text. Duval is part of a new generation of blue-collar New England writers who convey the stories of arguably the most often overlooked social group in "Yankee" literature. Duval's New Bedford, MA is my North End of Burlington, VT, could be another writer's Bath, Maine or another writer's Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Duval's writing is iconoclastic; it gives agency to a mass of people the literary world would rather forget. Clayton

Hard, gritty, real

Duval, misplaced Southerner I believe him to be (what with his conflicted view of religion and preoccupation with blue-collar grit), has written as fine a debut collection as I've read in many years. Reminiscent of Thom Jones, Denis Johnson and Larry Brown's FACING THE MUSIC.