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Through the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Spirits, Padgett Powell's new collection of reports, Cries for Help, Various Tales, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme's advice that "wacky setting must "break their hearts". The surrealistic and comical ground of almost all of the 44 reports here's grounded by a real preoccupation with longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia. These universal concerns are given exhilarating life by way of Powell's "wit, his...dazzling turns of saying" (Scott Spencer). In "Joplin and Dickens", the musician and copy writer meet as psychologically needy students within an American grade school; in "Change of Life", a father ponders whether getting new clothes for the family or the patriotic purchase of a "new Administration Cookie Flyer" would be more meaningful. In "The Important Mood", giving orders to others "Fall back and regroup" leads less to power than to rumination. Padgett Powell's dialect is both lofty and low-down, his shade cranky and heartfelt, exuberant and inconsolable. His character types rebel against convention and ambition, expecting to keep their very sanity by doing so. Even the most hilarious or fantastical reports in Cries for Help, Various ring gloriously, poignantly, true.
