Name: G.H. Plaag 's review of Prodigals by Greg Jackson
Item: Prodigals
Rating: 4.5
Author: G.H. Plaag

Greg Jackson

"People are bullets, fired," the narrator declares in one of the desperate, eerie stories that make up Greg Jackson'sProdigals. He's fleeing New York, with a woman who may be his therapist, as a storm bears down. Self-knowledge here is no safeguard against self-sabotage. A banker sees his artistic ambitions laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. A midlife divorcée escapes to her seaside cottage only to find a girl living in it. A journalist is either the guest or the captive of a former tennis star at his country mansion in the Auvergne. Jackson's sharp debut drills into the spiritual longing of today's privileged elite. Adrift in lives of trumpeted possibility and hidden limitation, in thrall to secondhand notions of success, the flawed, sympathetic, struggling characters in these stories seek refuge from meaninglessness in love, art, drugs, and sex. Unflinching, funny, and profound,Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life with unusual insight and passion--from the obsession with celebrity, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the impotence of violence, to the loss of grand narratives. Prodigals is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, at the comedy of our foibles and the pathos of our longing for home.

Stories

Prodigals

G.H. Plaag 

Nathan Griffin

I struggled through about 90% of this and read the following sentence and just couldn't go any further. (Still counting this because it was a hard fought & painful 90%):

"And soon enough—or, you know, whenever—I found myself back in the sunny yard, watching Gabrielle articulate her body in serpentine asanas, listening to Terry interview an author I like, and then an actress I like, as happy as a puppy and at peace, because what I understood just then was that Terry Gross’s voice was the voice of the metanarrative, demotic ur-parent, Catcher in the WHYY, the call of the shepherd returning me to the pastures of solicitude and moderation, that cultural plane on which the day’s horrific news—ecocatastrophe, civilizational conflict, postcolonial scarring, and our legacies of violence and extortion—was not diminished or ignored but existed in a strange vaporous adjacency to yuppie mores, triumphalist life narratives, midcult art, and an anachronistic fixation on jazz, this narrow-bandwidth refugium for temperamental decency and civic virtue and a heartbreaking reasonableness that seemed less and less like the earned wisdom of life than a tragic hope laid over it"

G.H. Plaag &
Prodigals by Greg Jackson

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G.H. Plaag &Prodigals by Greg Jackson

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G.H. Plaag &
Prodigals by Greg Jackson