Book Review: Men in the Making by Bruch Machart

Men In The Making
By Bruce Machart
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Print List Price: $24
Ebook Price: $9.99

Bruce Machart has held a lot of jobs in his life, mainly blue collar macho jobs like working oil rigs and working refineries in the Houston area, and this machismo is on display in the stories in Men in the Making. I have to say that I was born and currently live in the areas that serve as the settings for most of these stories. Most of them happen in the Houston, TX greater metroplex. That is probably why I didn't fall under the spell of Machart's writing as much as say, someone that lives in New York City. To someone that lives in the North or West, a lot of the place names might seem romantic or exotic. But to me, as I read the stories, I was like, wait, there isn't a Walmart on that street in Deer Park at the corner of such and such a street. Or, hold on, there isn't a line of trees at that location. Machart's push to make these stories very realistic made them TOO realistic to myself. Knowing all the locations that he describes intimately just totally ruined the fiction of it all.
    
Sadly, none of the stories in this collection grabbed my attention until the last two. "Among the Living Amongst the Trees" is about the effect of the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas on a resident's marriage and town. The media vultures that descended on Jasper were eerily like those that flocked to stick cameras in the faces of Newtown victims. "What You're Walking Around Without" is about a disabled medical courier whose delivery of a stillborn child to a medical lab makes him question the meaning of death and the justice of God.
    
I have to say that without these last two stories, the collection would have been a total wash. But the last two were SO powerful that it gives me hope for Machart's future as a writer. I'll definitely give his next work a look to see if he can harness a talent that he can only seem to use fleetingly right now. I would say that Machart is spending too much time writing about what he "knows" and should push the envelope a bit on his subject matter. Because he's not a Dostoyevsky or a Joyce or a Proust that could get magic out of ordinary people or what would seem to be boring social situations or mundane events.

My Grade: C