Men in the Making

Written by Bruce Machart

Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

Bruce Machart, the author of The Wake of Forgiveness, pens this critically acclaimed collection of 10 nuanced tales. The characters in Machart's affecting fiction find themselves attempting to measure up to their own beliefs in what it means to be a man, even as they struggle and often fail to be good providers, to protect their wives from violence, and to shield their children from life's brutality. ". a mesmerizing, mythic saga."-New York Times Book Review on The Wake of Forgiveness

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781461847878

Reviews for Men in the Making

[texasbooklover · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

StoriesBy Bruce MachartHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 190 pgs978-0-15-603444-9Someone or something dies in every one of these stories; more often than not it's a person, sometimes a opossum.Men In the Making is a slim volume of 10 short stories by Bruce Machart. Each story considers a defining event in the life of a blue collar man. These men pull the second shift at the oil refineries south of Houston; shoot logs through the mills in the Piney Woods; and drive delivery trucks full of bio-waste from a hospital, in one memorable case. These men are trying to figure out how to be blue collar men in a world that finds them lacking. It is no longer enough to be the men their fathers were. Now they have to be that man plus a man that shares his feelings and shops for groceries and takes his daughter to gymnastics. Most of the men in these stories are trying but I don't have much patience for this sort of thing. You know what? Boo hoo, suck it up.I enjoyed some of these stories but the collection in sum is disappointing. There's nothing new here. Mr. Machart is talented but has a way to go still. I will follow his work. He has potential. That said, there were a couple of stories I liked very much. "The Only Good Thing I've Heard" is about a husband trying to find a path out of the fear, anger and soul-sadness of a late-term miscarriage for himself and his wife. This story is delicate and hesitant and warm and reminds me of honey. The next story I like is "Among the Living Amidst the Trees." This story recalls a horrific crime that took place in East Texas when actual evil showed up and tied a black man to the bumper of it's pickup and dragged him behind it until all that was left of that man was grease. This story explores how a man in the making who calls this town home would face such a horror, especially when the national media arrives and holds a mirror up for him to see.

[jackieblem · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bruce Machart is one hell of a writer. I'd go so far as to say that he is a "3-D writer"--his stories jump off the page in vivid Technicolor with perfect Dolby sound and the grit of Texas sand in your mouth. He has a mastery of language that makes even a four page story a deep and enriching experience. And these are not easy stories to tell as they are all about men or boys at a crossroad or epiphany of one kind or another. There are ten stories in the book, all of them gritty, real, raw and intense. A lot of dogs die in this book. A lot of men have to face themselves in this book. And a lot of readers will be deeply impressed with the searing honesty in each and every one of them. This is definitely a "guys" book, but ladies, you don't want to miss out on this amazing book either, for it's worth the read (and a re-read, or a dozen re-reads). Cutting to the chase, "READ THIS BOOK".

[davidabrams · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was halfway through Bruce Machart's debut collection of short stories, Men in the Making, when I rushed over to Facebook and posted this somewhat breathless message: "I can only read one story per day because they are like miniature razor blades bumping through my bloodstream. This is fiction that excoriates and scrubs the reader from the inside out." That sort of hyperbole is pretty typical of me and sometimes I'll later "reflect and regret" when I look back at what I've written.Not in this case. Machart's ten stories, set mostly in Texas, are brutally good. It's the kind of fiction you read with equal parts pleasure and pain. It's the kind of pain that's good for you--the dental yank of the festered tooth, the extraction of the splinter, the snap-crunch back into place of the dislocated shoulder. At times, the stories can be hard to read, but when we've made it through to the end, we're rewarded with that sweet succor of catharsis.But yes, it can be emotionally wrenching to reach those epiphanies. Machart, who also wrote the excellent novel The Wake of Forgiveness, doesn't shy away from the awful. He forces you to take your eyes off the road ahead and stare at all the gory realities of the wreck on the shoulder of the highway. In "The Only Good Thing I've Heard," for instance, we spend some time with Raymond, a nurse in a burn unit, as he administers debridement treatments to the patients. There are scenes in there guaranteed to make you squirm. But you cannot look away.Or consider this opening paragraph of "Monuments":When I was ten, after my mother left Dad and me and flew off to Europe, Kevin, the five-year-old next door, got run down in front of our house. He was chasing a cat, and after his body hit the pavement and slid into the grass near the Houston Lighting and Power substation across the road, neighbors say a bearded man in overalls stumbled down from the truck, put a hand on the sideview mirror to keep his balance, and took a leak right there in the street, beer cans falling from the cab to his feet. Later, we heard that Kevin's aorta had burst, that he probably hadn't felt the asphalt peeling his skin or the dark green cool of the grass where he'd come to a crumpled stop.Every word in that paragraph is carefully orchestrated and impeccably placed, from the drunk's hand reaching out to the sideview mirror for balance to the "dark green cool of the grass" to the "crumpled stop." That kind of hard work on the part of the writer is all but invisible to the reader caught up in what's happening on the page. The details in that paragraph are so vivid and so shocking you forget it started with the seemingly-casual comment that the narrator comes from a broken home. But that absentee mother and the narrator's longing for love are central to the story. Kevin with his peeled skin is important, too, but he's the gory window dressing that pulls you inside the door.Another standout story is "Because He Can't Not Remember"--the tension starting in the double negative of the title. It's about a couple--new parents--in the last five minutes of their life together in a Walmart parking lot on "another Houston night so hot and humid you could hang teabags from tree branches to steep." In a few moments, their lives will intersect with the troubled Ramirez twins in their blue LeMans cruising the parking lot and they will all be changed forever. After reading this, I sat in my chair, unable to move for several minutes, reamed through and through by the unbearable heaviness and beauty of the writing.Machart also does an excellent job of describing the worlds in which his characters live; the details of the stories take us to places most of us have never been--a lumber mill, for instance, with this explanation of a debarker from "The Last One Left in Arkansas":Imagine a porcupine turned inside out, a big mother with three-foot-long steel quills. That’s what a debarking drum is like. An enormous pipe, fifteen feet in diameter and lined inside with hundreds of these quills. Load it with a dozen or so twenty-foot-tall, forty-year-old Arkansas pine trunks, turn that sucker on, get it rolling good, and thirty seconds later you’ve got naked trees, fresh and clean as an Eden stream. Step back, blow the bark and sap out the discharge vents, smell that rich, sappy-sweet smell, and keep on keepin’ on.After reading Machart's story, I know enough to stay away from one of these machines and not let my curiosity lead me inside to check out those quills at a time when no one else knows I'm in there and the foreman comes along to throw the switch. That happens here in "The Last One Left in Arkansas" and it's not pretty.There's not a single story in this collection that doesn't work its ass off to earn genuine sympathy for its characters. These men defy the stereotype of blunt, hard-shelled machismo; Machart makes them far more complex than that. Oh sure, there's some swagger, but we recognize it for the thin shield it is; like this paragraph from the opening story, the aptly-named "Where You Begin":You know Jimmy, all right. Here’s a guy with--as he’ll tell you--a truck and some luck and on good nights a fuck. A guy just far enough out of his mind to own the Exxon shipping and receiving record for blindfolded forklift driving--all hundred and five feet of the loading dock and down the ramp without ever putting on the brakes. Yup, Jimmy’s got more bowling shirts than sense, but you’ve been knowing him a long time, and when tit turns to trouble he ain’t ever late in that truck. He’s good people, Jimmy, never mind all his ribbing. For every Jimmy, we get men like the members of the pipe fitter's union in "Among the Living Amidst the Trees" who shave their heads in sympathy for a co-worker with cancer:These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts.In Men in the Making, Machart is trying to get all the way to that inner core of hurt, past the leather epidermis of stoicism and brute force. What he finds, in fact, is that men are some of the most tender creatures around--whether they know it or not. The very last line of the last story in the book neatly sums it up: "to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need." Though women aren't the main characters in these stories, neither are they marginalized. We are all travelers on the same journey, Machart says, with the same vulnerabilities and fear. Every reader has something to gain from the beautiful scouring debridement of Machart's fiction.

[writestuff_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren’t afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts. – from the collection Men in the Making, page 139 -Bruce Machart writes with a brutal and tender honesty about his characters in his first collection of short stories: Men in the Making. These stories are about men working in sawmills and on the backs of tractors, men who are fathers and husbands and grandfathers, men whose lives are not easy, men who have made huge mistakes and experienced aching regrets, men whose desires are raw and heartbreaking. A common thread of loss runs through most of Machart’s stories. He peels back the rough exterior of these mostly blue collar workers, and reveals the lost dreams, the hopes and the tragedies which fill them up.The Last One Left in Arkansas opens with a tragedy – a young man has been killed in the debarker in a sawmill. Through this story within the story, Machart allows us into the world of a man, a worker at the sawmill, who has lost a son.Here in this valley, clear through to March, when on nights like tonight I sometimes sit on the porch in my parka, sipping whiskey and shivering and trying to find just the right prayer for the son I lost eleven years back, or the courage to call the one who’s alive but living hundreds of miles away, often even the clouds turn lethargic, and they sit, and they stay. – from The Last One Left in Arkansas, page 14 -As the story unwinds, the reader learns how this man has lost not only a son, but a wife and a family. Machart tenderly opens old wounds, exposes the heat of guilt and regret, and leaves us with a small light of hope at the end. What Machart does so well in this story (and all the other stories in his collection) is get beneath the hard exterior of his protagonist and show us not only his vulnerability, but who he really is.Lose a plant and you learn to respect the elements, to prepare for them. There’s no one to blame but yourself. Lose a child and, for a while, the only thing that can keep you sane and above ground and alive enough to hate yourself is the burn-off of rage you ignite by laying blame somewhere, on something or someone else, so you can keep it from burrowing inside you and living where deep down you believe it belongs. – from The Last One Left in Arkansas, page 21 -In The Only Good Thing I’ve Heard, Machart also examines the loss of a child – this time a child who is stillborn. The main character in this story is a man who works on a burn unit of a hospital. He is a caretaker, one who puts others’ pain before his own, and so as we learn about his wife’s torment, we almost forget about this man’s grief. And then, in eloquent and simple prose, Machart exposes it:Now, on the phone, her voice was hushed and broken, and Raymond leaned hard into the receiver, wanting to be there, to feel her breath swirling inside his ear. “You’re okay,” he said, and he knew, for the first time in days, that if she wasn’t, she would be.“And you, honey,” she said. “How are you?” – from The Only Good Thing I’ve Heard, page 108 -It is these moments in Machart’s prose where I found myself pausing, felt my heart restricting, because the writing in this collection is gorgeous. It is evocative and honest, and takes the reader right there, into the heart of what it means to be human.I read Machart’s first novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, last year and loved the richness of his prose, the complexity of his characters, and his skill at demonstrating the relationship between father and son. That ability is evident in Machart’s short story collection as well – especially in We Don’t Talk That Way in Texas, a story about a nine year old boy who leaves his home in Oklahoma one summer to visit his grandfather in Texas. The boy has never known his father who died in the war, and this is the first time he has met his grandfather who is a rough man, a farmer, and a Texan. The visit, filled with a boy’s first taste of beer, a tractor driving lesson and a hunting trip with an unexpected ending…will reveal a father and his relationship with his father.There always were, in Grandpa’s way of speaking, lessons to be learned about the way Texans did things, or didn’t do them, and to me, they began that summer to sound like his way of talking about my father without speaking of him directly. – from We Don’t Talk That Way in Texas, page 75 -All the ten stories in Men in the Making are atmospheric, calling up the landscape and the working people of places like Texas and Arkansas. Machart has a firm grasp of the world in which his characters live.If you haven’t figured it out yet, I loved this collection as I knew I would. Readers will find themselves pulled into the lives of the characters, feeling their sadness, their anger, their regret…they will wish for their redemption and their healing. Highly recommended for those who enjoy the art of the short story and who love beautiful writing which evokes the deepest of emotions.