The following are either reviews or stories that have appeared in the media on my writing:
NHPR: NH Public Radio did a piece on ThisI Believe: On Fatherhood, which I have an essay in and was featured in a story on NHPR at: www.nhpr.org/essays-and-about-dad
Reviews: The following is a review published February 2010 in The Short Review. There is also a brief interview of me included with the review.
Reviewed by Sarah Hilary
The title story of this collection, Selling Their Childhood, is a visceral tale related by a cynical teenager who, at the age of sixteen, is already past his prime as a young prostitute working the bus stop steps in Omaha. His best friend is a dreamer but the hero knows their fate is written in the hard eyes of the fathers who pay for their services before returning home to family life in the suburbs. We see these predatory hypocrites very clearly although they don’t feature in the story as anything more than the reason for the hero and his friend to be sitting at the bus stop, a few yards from Sammy, a young dealer who is waiting for the hero to earn enough money to buy his next hit. The relationship between these boys and the men who use them is vividly drawn by Buchanan, who keeps everyone distant from one another, the better to underline the mercenary nature of the relationships. It’s a masterly balancing act and one that makes the story accessible while in no sense sanitising the hard truth at its heart.
The suburban family man is brought to life also in The Incorrigible, a coming-of-age story about a group of friends rebelling against their school and community. Buchanan writes with bitterly black humour of the family men who mount their riding lawn mowers more often than they mount their wives, and who are as trapped in the patterns of their lives as the boys feel in their adolescence. The hero in The Incorrigible, like that in Selling Their Childhood, seems wise beyond his years, sometimes straying into an adult perspective that jars a little in this tale (we can believe in the cynicism of the young hustler, but this schoolboy seems preternaturally adult).
A cynical note of my own: I could wish the collection hadn’t kicked off with its weakest story. Reason #1,133 to Quit Drinking begins with the hero waking with a hangover. My heart sank; I feared I was in for a whole book of stories about despoiled machismo, the smoking of dead cigarette butts and the hubris of inaccurate male urination. I wasn't much encouraged by the two typos that followed in quick succession ("here" for "hear", and "taught" for "taut"), but once I was beyond this first story I found the collection as a whole very nearly eclectic in its range of subject matter, and the author more than adept at writing young boys, old men and new fathers.
The second story, Alexei K, is an almost painfully private glimpse into the life of an aged Russian émigré in New York. The third story is more convincing still: a lascivious old roué recalling past triumphs as he imagines pleasures yet to come. The descriptive passages – sensual, shocking and amusingly self-deprecating – are brilliantly handled by Buchanan.
Rainy Day with Jack is a touchingly intimate portrait of a new father struggling to pacify his hungry son as they wait for the return of the baby’s mother (who has, with an exasperating lack of foresight, decided to breastfeed their son but failed to provide expressed sustenance for the poor child should she be delayed returning home). Luckily for Jack, his dad is a lovely chap who resists the negativity that comes with the exhaustion of trying to get a hungry baby to go to sleep without feeding first.
Beyond the hangover on page one, my only real disappointment with the collection came from The Blue. This has perhaps the best premise of any story in the collection – tense, compelling, taut with promise – that of an infertile woman filling in the time while her husband and her sister try to conceive a child. The story opens with the heroine closing the bedroom door on her husband and sister, listening for sounds of intimacy before moving away.
Rather than staying with the appalling tension of this scene, Buchanan chooses to retreat into back-story of the heroine’s childhood, her mother’s alcoholism and her own creative discoveries. As readers we have never left the bedroom door, and perhaps Buchanan intends us to believe his heroine hasn’t left it either – that she’s attempting to distract herself during the sexual transaction between her husband and her sister – but I felt the story slipping away into a more staid realm than the one we were promised at its outset. Nothing in the flashback added to the tension of the transaction, rather it diluted its impact. We discovered the heroine had recently suffered a breakdown, and were left wondering why she wanted this child so much, and why her husband and sister would collude to bring a child into the precarious world of post-traumatic stress.
The promise of The Blue was so immense that perhaps it was bound to fall short in its execution. Taken overall, however, this collection is a testament to Buchanan’s intimacy with human frailty and his ability to bring it to life without blunting any of its sharp, breakable edges.
This review is from Rachel Forrest, food writer extraordinaire for the Portsmouth Herald and other publications.
"Boyhood, fatherhood, and an adulthood for which those who live in the rough streets has come too fast and too harshly are a part of the rolling landscape in James Buchanan's compelling stories. Oscar falls in love and gets a reality check in Renee and Me as the attachment and naivete we've all experienced turns into more longing. In the title story, Selling Their Childhood, we find young prostitutes cooly discussing tricks and drugs, and it stings our suburban sensibilities with it's rawness and realism, the dialog immediate and authentic. Then there's the new father alone with his infant son on a rainy day, dealing with his baby's fussiness but also with the changes he's facing in a quiet, thoughtful narrative. No matter what the setting or who the characters are, familiar or out of our realm of experience, Buchanan's stories touch each of us in some way and leave us remembering the feeling for a long time afterwards."
The following is from laura Pope author of "Portsmouth" with photographs by Nancy Grace Horton.
"James Buchanan’s collection of short stories, Selling Their Childhood, artfully spans the spectrum of human existence at several life stages. In To The Swimming Hole, we follow a pack of exuberant boys as they race to their oasis for the season’s first dip, while in Selling Their Childhood, we meet a very different group of teen boys, selling their bodies and souls in a gritty, hardscrabble survival story set in the mid-west. Many stories deal with the roller coaster ride of falling in and out of love as another tale delves into the highs and lows of young fatherhood. Some of the best moments come in the observational, prose-perfect story of Alexei K., whose unforeseen life journey packs a wallop with memories of an unexpected Eden. It ranks right up there with O. Henry and Maupassant."
(I need some reviewers to lend a hand so please if you have any comments as to my work send them to: orchard-65@comcast.net)