Writing Like a Man on Fire: Brief Lives by Keith Hazzard
A Short Fiction Review by Ian Colford
There is a breathless quality to Keith Hazzard’s collection of 60 tersely written fictions, aptly titled Brief Lives.
As the title suggests, these are lives summed up, sometimes in a single paragraph, but complete with incident, romance, ironic twists of fate and blunt statement of fact: a roller-coaster with each denouement followed headlong by the next. Hazzard takes his inspiration from quotidian experience. His characters are the husbands, wives, sons, daughters, luckless young men, divorcees, accident victims, criminals and adulterers among us.
Many of the pieces proceed by implication, the driving force being what’s left unsaid, hovering between the lines. “Love and Strife” describes a love triangle at a hat factory: Dennis lives with Laureen but falls in love with Shirley. Difficulties ensue, firings, estrangements. But the story turns on a single line: “Time swung its axe.” And afterward, everyone gets what’s coming to them. In “All Hallows,” it’s Halloween and Bruce Rutledge is savoring middle age as life’s pressures ease up. Then he gets a call “on the burner phone,” and cooly fetches a body for disposal, but won’t let the job weigh on his mind because he has “candy to pick up and a pumpkin to carve.”
Other pieces strike a more contemplative, even nostalgic tone. “Satellite,” the enigmatic tale of the final months of Phyllis and Lowell Steinbach’s marriage, ends with Lowell “living on the other side of the world, planning a trip to the moon.”
There is violence here as well, implied, dreamed and committed, leaving in its wake grievous bodily harm, trashed living rooms, or even a basement full of chopped-up mannequins. The variety of narrative styles is remarkable, and some of the pieces—the mysterious “Vječan” is an example—generate enormous tension in just a few lines of clipped prose.
“The urgency in the telling is palpable.”
Throughout, Hazzard keeps his cards close to his chest, and the reader is occasionally left wondering what’s happening. But, because of their brevity, the pieces invite subsequent readings, which might offer an altered perspective or a new angle of interpretation. And everywhere the jolt of poetry leaps from the page. In “Kairos,” Lee “had no wishes larger than the day he was in.” And in “All the Lovely Judies,” Jon Tropp and his dog are out tramping “through the cold slap rain and grasping mud.”
The urgency in the telling is palpable. It’s almost as if the author was watching the clock tick down and had no choice but to get these stories told before it was too late. The pithy, rapid-fire delivery gives the reader little chance to absorb what they’ve read the first time around, but that simply makes re-reading the book an essential delight.
Keith Hazzard writes like a man on fire, and Brief Lives is a virtuoso performance, as entertaining as it is elusive.
About the Author
Keith Hazzard is a fresh new voice who writes in plenitude by compression. Detonations, like rain on leaves; like nothing you’ve heard before.
About the Reviewer
Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.
Book Details
Publisher : Exile Editions (Dec 31 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 112 pages
ISBN-10 : 1990773540
ISBN-13 : 978-1990773549