cover image The Melancholy of Departure: Stories

The Melancholy of Departure: Stories

Alfred DePew. University of Georgia Press, $19.95 (132pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1405-1

The protagonists of the stories in this Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection draw on a highly personalized assortment of survival tricks to maintain hope as they fall short of expectations, either their own or those of society. In ``Ralph and Larry,'' 418-lb. Larry dines on pie and tries to analyze his shrink, while Ralph, his companion, is into gay ``leather sex.'' The eponymous hero of ``Hurley'' is a slightly addled, would-be political activist who threatens to blow up a porn shop with a suitcase full of laundry and later ashamedly masturbates to a skin flick. Other stories chronicle more conventional struggles. DePew relies heavily on monologue and on present tense, devices that frequently seem cliched here. Although his tone ranges from meditative to cross to comic, all the while retaining some taste of the melancholy proposed by his title, DePew fails to stake out a distinctive territory and to project a distinctive voice. (Apr.)