WordsKindWords
For THE SALT PALACE:
"Above the footnotes (which serve as a kind of guide to Mormonia and the Utah Jazz) in this fine first novel, Darren DeFrain serves up the trials of Brian, another young American caught between his religion and the hard places of youth. This bittersweet homecoming, about a part of the world I know well, is both tough and tender, and certainly convincing. This novel is an engaging debut by a writer to watch." ~ Ron Carlson, author of At the Jim Bridger: Stories and A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories
"With the publication of The Salt Palace, we welcome a brave new voice to American fiction. Darren DeFrain is one hell of a writer. The marvel of this gritty and propulsive first novel is that DeFrain, right out of the gates, has staked claim on a wild new territory of desperate love, alienation, heartbreak, and redemption. A stranger in his own land, our hero Brian is driving across America to find himself or to lose himself, he's not sure which. He's got a passenger with him -- Randy, a one-armed Mormon Lone Ranger, a character as memorable as any I've met in contemporary fiction, and there's room for one more. So hop on in, but strap on your seatbelt and hold on to your hat. The road's a little bumpy up ahead." ~ John Dufresne, author of Deep in the Shade of Paradise
"The Salt Palace is a novel that zigzags across America, across our
religion-soaked history too: our national obsession with shorter, faster routes
to redemption. Its protagonist, Brian, leaves his claustrophobic life in
Michigan to revisit his childhood home and faith. He wants to live in it, and
outside it too, sampling all the generous, heady, forbidden sensation. He makes
this trip with a one-armed, splinter-sect prophet who might be a lunatic. It's
never clear. Neither is the right path. Yet Brian and therefore the reader is
granted a fleeting glimpse of a grace-filled, ecumenical afterlife the most
cynical of us would be glad to inhabit. I loved this novel, its risks and
realities."
~
Debra Monroe, author of Shambles, Newfangled, A Wild, Cold
State, and The Source of Trouble
"If you think we don't need another heavily footnoted Mormon road trip basketball novel, think again. With this unorthodox gem, Darren DeFrain creates a genre of his own, with the athletic ease of the Angel Moroni going in for a layup. Thoughtful, deadpan, shot through with comic inspiration, it's a debut worth doing the wave for." ~ J. Robert Lennon, author of MAILMAN
DeFrain uses imagery of light and dark as if the night sky is a source of revelation often obscured by Brian's muddled life. He finally makes it to his parents' house and helps them load the moving van. "It is completely dark...and there are no stars shining through the clouds; only the smallest portion of moonlight is making it down to me in my parents' drive-way." In several scenes he looks from the dark outside upon someone illuminated from within the house.
Often he is looking in from outside, wanting to experience the real, whatever that is. He reflects, "The present is some long justification of our past we keep arriving at, only we can't ever arrive there."
The novel's ending is startling and ambiguous, unfinished (like the playoffs), uncertain, much like Brian's life. The story reverberates and unsettles, long after reading. -- Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle (October 23, 2005). Read the full review here.
"I wanted to draw on places I know really well," he says. As for the Salt Palace title, he says, "That place has always sounded so mythic to me. I also like how it implies something semi-permanent and important, yoked to something common and crystalline. I think, thematically, it just works for what the characters are searching for." -- Interview with Brandon Griggs, Salt Lake Tribune (November 13, 2005). Read the full review here.
"If there is one rule DeFrain does follow, it’s that we Americans tend to like movement of various kinds in our fiction. That restlessness is here, literally and figuratively, and it has the effect of being simultaneously satisfying and disquieting, which is, I suspect, exactly what the author intended.This is a great start to what will be, I hope, a long and productive career." -- Reviewed by John Mark Eberhart in The Kansas City Star (December 25, 2005). Read the full review here.
"The Salt Palace, by Darren Defrain. Wichita writer’s novel isn’t afraid to mix humor and pathos." -- "The Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of 2005. The Kansas City Star (December 4, 2005). Read the full 100 here.
"What does it mean to be a basketball fan? What roles do the game and its players have in the daily lives of their fans? Darren DeFrain asks many questions in his book The Salt Palace, but coming to the end it seems these two questions are the ones he's seeking most earnestly - and finds the answers to most completely." -- Bill Ingram, Hoopsworld, Dec. 31st, 2005. Read the full review here.
"The Salt Palace is an odd hybrid, at heart a fairly simple, even archetypal story adorned with some of the trappings of postmodernism. Mysteries remain stubbornly unexplained, and the novel leaves us with a menacing man knocking at Brian’s door. DeFrain proffers a morsel of resolution in Brian’s vision of his sins “diminished, if not burned completely away,” only to snatch it back a page later: “There’s no closure in what I have at this moment, though, only the cold resonance resonating.” A compelling and entertaining read, The Salt Palace is a truly impressive first novel." -- Deborah Mead, NewPages, 2006. Read the full review here.
New Pages New and Noteworthy Books listing, December 29th, 2005. Read full list of Noteworthy books here.
ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award Finalist. Complete list of finalists here.
"DeFrain crafted a funky road-trip novel about a guy sharing a drive from Michigan to his Utah home with a one-armed man. Odd enough right there, but the author also provides a handy guide to nearly everything of significance in the local culture. His footnotes—some of which run nearly two pages long—offer descriptions of various LDS church practices, the careers of celebrated Utah Jazz players and multiple geographic landmarks. It’s as efficient a summary of our state as you’ll find in fictional form." -- Salt Lake City Weekly's "Arty" Awards Issue, September 7, 2006. Read the full list of Artys here.
"Overall, The Salt Palace is another excellent example of travel fiction, blending the travails of the road itself with the accompanying and difficult manuevers of the soul in the process." -- Barrett Bowlin review from the Manhattan Mercury, October 29, 2006. Read the full review here.
For INSIDE & OUT:
"Darren DeFrain's INSIDE & OUT is a wonderfully companionable book. It's eleven stories are told by a variety of first person narrators who share a keen eye and a caring, critical heart--a combination that makes for the comic center of the author's voice. As the stories roam from the West to Wisconsin a contemporary America crafted from in its own deceptively colorful, plain--ie. economical--language emerges. It's the style of storyteller, sure enough of his stories to tell them straight, adorned only by epigrammatically tight insight." -- Stuart Dybek, winner of the MacArthur Fellowship and author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan.
"These stories -- dramatic monologues of
the highest order -- display a wealth of voices, each acting as a single
instrument in the creation of an orchestral version of our American
life. DeFrain has listened faithfully to his characters, and they have spoken
to and through him with honesty and charm." -- Antonya Nelson, author of
five short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner’s 2006), In
The Land Of Men, and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl,
and Living to Tell.
For Other Work:
"What I like about Natural Bridge--one of its
many strengths--is that it has a sense of humor. The short story "Big Mike" by
Darren DeFrain is one such example. In synopsis, the story is anything but
funny: an alcoholic is coerced into taking his son to a father/son "Indian
Guide" outing. Big Mike, the alcoholic, is the story's foul-mouthed narrator,
and while the reader may not like him, it's possible for the reader to empathize
with him along the way and, even, be amused by his observations. Time and again,
as much as I resisted, I found myself on Big Mike's side, as when he heads out
into the Michigan winter morning and observes several fathers chipping a hole
into an ice-covered lake: "I'm next," Marty says from right next to me and he
takes his coat off. But he doesn't stop there. He takes off his shirt, and his
undershirt, and his boots and socks and his pants and his underwear. His
headband is the last to go and he lays this down on his pants next to his bare
feet. His dick looks like a circus peanut in the cold and I can't believe he's
not embarrassed by it."
Naked, Marty then jumps through the hole and into the icy water. Big Mike,
unable to find anything remotely communal about the experience, thinks they're
all nuts. By the story's end, however, Big Mike attempts his own spectacle. It's
the sort of ending that I love: there is no dramatic character change, no
turnaround, but rather an image, or series of images, that exposes a character's
vulnerability, showing us a dimension we haven't yet seen, an attempt on the
narrator's part to stake a claim, to make his mark, for better or worse.
Author DeFrain is just one of the many accomplished newcomers in this
issue." ~
John McNally,
as reviewed in Literary Magazine Review.
Click here for the
complete review.
THE LATE ANDRE DUBUS DISCUSSING MY SHORT FICTION: MP3 file referring in part to these short stories: "The Tree", "The Monolith", and "The Canyon"
"This excellent journal ends with "Ms. Goffrier," a non-fictional work that is both honest and sensitive in its reflection. Ms. Goffrier, a stereotypical character, is an instructor for the advanced riding class at the military academy where she is at once resented and cherished for her feminine influence and spontaneity. In his writing, Darren DeFrain does not shy away from experience; he explores it. And the effort that it takes for a writer to do so makes the time spent with the journal worth the while." [Gihon River Review, Johnson State College, Johnson Vermont 05656. Single issue $5. http://grr.jsc.vsc.edu/main%20page.htm] —Donna Everhart (from NewPages.com Literary Magazine review)