The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot

In this new collection, Jack Driscoll has proven himself again to be one of the finest fiction writers at work these days. His great gift is how uniquely he is able to bestow complexity upon his characters, complete their humanity with just this or that perfect detail, or gesture, or line of dialogue. Combined with the empathy that, as a writer, he shows for all of them, along with his sly eye for foibles and absurdities, reading his fiction feels like living it, and you come away from his pages under his influence, with a deeper vision of your own, feeling understood and better able to understand. There’s no sentimentality in The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, but Driscoll is able to see through others’ eyes in a way few writers can, and his work adds to the world’s store of compassion. And, such language! Without ever compromising the power and immediacy and pull of his stories, his sentences often just have to be reread and admired. There’s everything in this book that a work of fiction can give us—suspense, and comfort, and conflict, and character, and poetry, and landscape, and sanity, and craziness. It’s the kind of book that renews one’s belief in the power and importance of books.

A new book by Jack Driscoll is a cause for celebration. The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot reminds me—not that I’d forgotten—exactly why Driscoll has long been one of my favorite American writers. The qualities that have made his work indelible—his deeply intimate relationship with the natural world, the natural lyricism, and palpability of his language, the authentic way in which his always credible narratives earn their mystery—are here in abundance in this beautiful collection.

Moving across place and memory, these stories are technically dazzling and deeply affecting accounts of precarious lives in a unique environment.

The writing in this collection of stories is wonderful, the characters are raw, some stuck in their hopeless lives and old enough to know it’s not going to get better, others are scratching to escape households where their parents are miserable with the struggle of staying afloat, some still altered after being burned by love physically, bottom dwellers and those just ‘knocking around’. The children are just as perceptive and believable as the grown ups, maybe a little criminal but for good purposes.

There’s a beauty here, both in language and in content, and Driscoll is the master of capturing a delicate humanity where most people might be least likely to look. It is no accident that this collection ends with a story about miracles, and the arc of this book as a collection is beautiful and deliberate. Narrative’s tension comes from time, after all, and what is time but a life unfolding?

The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, ten stories comprising Jack Driscoll’s eleventh book, provides all the proof any judge of literature would need to place Driscoll near the top of what America has to offer in the way of supremely gifted writers.

Upper Peninsula Bestseller List for May 2017

The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, ten stories comprising Jack Driscoll’s eleventh book, provides all the proof any judge of literature would need to place Driscoll near the top of what America has to offer in the way of supremely gifted writers. As he has shown in works such as Wanting Only to be Heard, The World of a Few Minutes Ago, How Like an Angel, and many other novels, stories and poems, Driscoll is something of a savant when it comes to anatomizing men, women and children in their interactions with themselves and one another—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, siblings of either sex, all in their individual ways functional and dysfunctional.