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Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories, by Ellen Slezak
Download Last Year's Jesus: A Novella and Nine Stories, by Ellen Slezak
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Amazon.com Review
In her collection Last Year's Jesus, Ellen Slezak seems to take an almost defiant interest in her bleak hometown of Detroit. Her stories are peopled by marginal folks--a widow who runs a junk shop, an 11-year-old girl often left at home alone, a man diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. The protagonist in "Here in Car City" opens a European-style pension in the inner city against all advice, and Slezak seems to share her character's perverse determination not to give up on this tough town and its tough people. Several Motor City themes weave together in the novella "Head, Heart, Legs, or Arms," set against the backdrop of the 1967 Detroit race riots. In a dark panorama that recalls Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, a young girl endures the riots as she follows the Tigers's pennant race on her transistor radio. Her older sister attends the University of Michigan, where a serial killer is stalking the co-eds; her younger sister lies dying in the hospital. Slezak captures the way historical events play out in ordinary life: "On the sixth day of the riots, Aunt Jenny made meat loaf for dinner. Mona watched as she mixed together sticky raw meat, egg yolks, bread crumbs, and chopped onion, which Mona particularly didn't like." Never mind the carnage; when you're 11, it's the onions that really get to you. --Claire Dederer
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From Publishers Weekly
Don't be fooled by the playful title: the Polish-Catholic working class in Detroit and its environs, as depicted in Slezak's debut collection, is a largely gloomy heritage. Fractured families, alcoholism, dead-end jobs and above all a tendency toward inertia keep Slezak's characters rooted in a city of "busted-up businesses" or in "dull and modest" Michigan towns. In the best and liveliest stories, acerbic first-person voices puncture the malaise, such as when awkward college student Theresa Jagielski takes readers through a twist on a morality play that probes race and generational differences with subtle irony in the title story. In "Here in Car City," a young woman who opens the Pensione Detroit (an "inexpensive European-style hotel") in a run-down neighborhood forges an unforgettable bond with an industrious Polish hustler, and "If You Treat Things Right" showcases the bitter, knowing sass of middle-aged Jenny, a lifelong auto-plant worker contending with her sister's embarrassing infatuation with a college boy. Third-person narration serves Slezak less well; the remaining stories, though admirably loaded with details of Detroit's urban blight and the inner workings of its primary struggling industry, begin to suffer from a tonal and thematic sameness (dead or dying siblings, for example, are featured in three of the 10 stories). Such careful layering both authenticates the material and dulls the senses. Readers who have been missing gritty realism will find something to latch onto here, and the choice of place which Slezak renders vividly is both familiar and foreign enough to attract. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Product details
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Hyperion; 1 edition (April 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0786867418
ISBN-13: 978-0786867417
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.9 x 8.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars
3 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#6,836,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This collection of short stories is startling in it's ability to capture what life is like in Southeastern Michigan... Especially if you have any fondness for or familiarity with the working class Detroit suburbs or Polish-American culture. I just read "Tomato Watch" and I wasn't able to sleep until I wrote this review. It's not just the ethnic angle, Slezak also captures the - the what? the malaise? the trapped, depressed feeling? - that young people who grow up in Detroit's suburbs often have. In many ways, the thirty year old heroine of "Tomato Watch" is as trapped as her ninety-five year old Polish grandfather... Incredible... I left that world twenty years ago and this book brought it all back... To capture all that in one short story just knocks me out.Her style of writing also has this great subtle sarcasm, this vague sorrow, this fatalistic bitterness that can be seen in works by other Michigan-based or Michigan-influenced writers: Check out anything by Michael Moore, Elmore Leonard, A. M. Wellman or even Loren Estlemen...If you're from that part of the world, or just want to sample how strange your life would be if you were, "Last Year's Jesus" is a remarkable experience. (Just read "Tomato Watch," first)
A young girl follows the progression of a Passion Play, developing a crush along the way on the boy who played Jesus the previous year. She is a plain-looking girl, but has the rare joy of feeling important while he gives her special attention.A pregnant woman learns the importance of life during her summer of taking care of her sometimes-senile grandfather and his tomato patch.New to town, Pete Flatte inadvertently discovers the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the death of thousands of geese. These geese are the pride of the town. There is even a festival that heralds their arrival each October.....until they start mysteriously dying.A widowed mother, her young daughter and their lonely friend learn different forms of sacrifice....sometimes forced, other times brought on by friendship and love.In an attempt to improve things, CeAnn opens a Pensione offering inexpensive, quaint lodging just like that which can be found in Europe. Her efforts prove futile as she finds herself surrounded by all things run-down....alcoholism, abandoned buildings, etc. Her steadfast determination, however, refuses to allow her to be dragged down to their level.A young girl struggles with many changes in her life...the riots, one sister going off to college and the other near death. The one constant, and almost comforting, aspect of her life is the voice of Ernie Harwell, the radio commentator for the Detroit Tigers.This is just a sampling of the 10 stories (9 shorts and one novella) that make up "Last Year's Jesus". Each story is either set in Detroit or takes place close by with characters that once lived in the city. The book brings the reality of living in a city such as Detroit to its readers. Not by telling of many tragic happenings that make up the statistics of the neighborhood, but by sharing the every day lives of every day characters.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Ellen Slezak has taken an interesting approach to her writing. The reader shouldn't expect whole stories. It doesn't have the feel of a "here's the plot, here's the problem, and here's the solution" type book because that's not what it's supposed to be. This is something that must be understood before opening the pages, or the reader will be disappointed with the "no real ending" conclusions. There are things to be learned from the characters. Although there are no "happy endings" per se, there are oftentimes revelations.This book isn't the normal piece of fiction. In fact, it almost reads like non-fiction, like an episode of "60 minutes" or "Dateline" where a time period, a turning point, of someone's life is shared with the world.It's a book that touches close to home for many people, and may even open the hearts and eyes of some. The stories will pull the reader in and provide a captivating reality until the last page.
Reading Ellen Slezak's collection of short sotries, I kept thinking how different Detroit was from where I grew up. There's plenty of vivid detail in this solid, unpretentious prose to give a visitor an inside look at a Polish-American working class suburb. Enough to make me feel like I'd been out of town - somewhere I'd never visited before.The feelings evoked, though, were familiar. The characters never behave like stick figures or glossed-over personalities meant to be played by movie or sitcom actors. Their stories are interesting because they inhabit a specific time and place, but they have the sort of problems and insecurities and unlikely ambitions a lot of us have. More than a few have the quirky familiarity of your closest relatives, the ones you neglect until, years later, you recognize them in something you've done and wonder how they are, how they're getting along - because it wasn't obvious at the time, but those were the people you learned from the most. Not because they were especially wise. They were real.I think these stories are very good. Like some of the best fiction, they're about people who've seen their world change, one era passing into the next, and they're coping with it - more or less.
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