Brady Udall

i so very rarely find a collection of short stories, either by one person or many, where every single one included is powerful and well written and completely worth reading. this is that rare book.

there is a lot of humor in these pages, but most of these stories, at their base, are about how people cope with filling in the space that someone leaves when they die or are taken away (like through custody). there is at least a dull ache in all of the stories, and often the pain is much more show more present than that. it's never overdone or anything other than poignant, utterly realistic, and beautifully written.

i generally marvel at how an author can invest a reader so deeply in a short story that's, say, 15 or 20 pages long. in this collection udall has a story that made me both chuckle and cry (not just tear up) that was one page long.

i wish i was still in touch with the person who recommended me this book so i could thank her, and i wish that udall wrote faster because even though this first of his books is from 1997, he only has 2 others.

so good. show less

Brady Udall’s stories have humor, pain, loss and trouble rolled up together into a tumbleweed. In Midnight Raid a large Indian delivers a pygmy goat in the middle of the night to his son, who now lives with his ex-wife and her husband. He takes time to tell their neighbor to quiet down on the way.

In the title story, Goody Yates wanders away from a dental office in a daze after having four molars extracted. He gets picked up by a man named Custer and helps him get revenge on the man show more Custer’s wife left him for. A Mormon hell raiser in Buckeye the Elder gets close to a family of devout Baptists when he dates the daughter. A city boy returns to the ranch where he was raised – in the place where his father died – with an idea of getting revenge on the man responsible.

Letting Loose the Hounds has ex-wives, dead wives, dead fathers, dead children, and the people left behind that ache for them, and just ache in general. The sadness in each story is leavened with comedy and freshness. show less

4.0

Exceedingly well-written. And very funny. The prolonged section about the nuclear bomb testing, where it expands the story into something bigger than itself, at least for a brief period of time, was very startling, perfectly placed, and maybe my favorite part of the whole book. I have to think more about why. It'll have something to do with Rusty, of course (sidenote: my favorite and most heartbreaking character).

I do think I wanted more teeth overall.

It's the title that grabbed me with this book. I've thought of polygamists as misguided (at best) and abusive to women and children at worst. But never as lonely.

Enter Golden Richards, husband to four women and father to 28 children. Golden has drifted into his life. At first, his mother was firmly in coltrol of his life; then his father and finally his first wife Beverly rules the show. Golden is lonely -- unconnected with anyone -- and has fallen in love for the first time in his life with show more a woman he meets through his out-of-state job.

But, Golden is not only person in this book who is lonely. The author uses the scene of a large, polygamist family to highlight the loneliness of Trish (wife #4) and Rusty (aged 11, one of seven children of the third wife, Rose). He provides a perspective of isolation and connectedness that is thought-provoking.

The book is very entertaining, and often funny. While most of the family members are just part of the background, the portraits of Golden, his wives and several children, notably Rusty and Faye, are well drawn. These are complex characters facing everyday problems made more difficult by their chosen lifestyle. show less