The Evening News

Tony Ardizzone writes of the moments in our lives that shine, that burn in the dim expanse of memory with the intensity and vivid light of the evening news. The men and women in these stories tend to arrange their days, order their pasts, plan their futures in the light of such moments, finding epiphanies in the glowing memory of a father's laugh or a mother's repeated story, in a broken date or a rained-out ball game. Set mostly in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus on subjects that concern us all: disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape and infidelity, lost love. In "My Mother's Stories" a son resolves his mounting grief over his mother's imminent death by recalling the stories she has told all her life. "My Father's Laugh" tells of a young man teetering on the brink of adulthood, and finally finding hope and reassurance from the remembered sound of his bus-driver father's laugh, from remembered phrases such as "Move away from the window, lady, can't you see I'm driving" and "If you ain't got a quarter or a token there, grandma, you and your purse can get off at the next stop." The husband and wife in the title story look at their pasts -- his as an activist in the sixties and hers as a believer in reincarnation and the tarot -- in light of the news stories they watch on television each evening, and question whether they should bring a child into the world. And in "The Walk-On," a bartender and former varsity pitcher for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini finds the actual events of the most cataclysmic day in his past unequal to their impact on his life and so rewrites them in his mind, adding an ill-placed banana peel, a falling meteor, and a careening truck in order to create a more fitting climax and finally to leave those memories behind him. Searching their pasts for clues to the present, searching the horizons of their days for love, the characters in The Evening News seek, and sometimes find, redemption in a world of uncertainty and brightly burning emotions.From Publishers WeeklyWinner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection is a combination of daring and prosaic writing. Ardizzone is at his best when he takes a few risks, experimenting with the intertwining of past and present. "My Father's Laugh" is a powerful evocation of a young man's relationship with his father; the narrator comes to terms with both his father's death and a dying love affair. The title story, too, in which a couple watches the news and wonders how they can bring a child into such a terrible world, much less find a way to affirm their own love for one another, shows Ardizzone to be a self-assured writer with something to say. Many of these pieces, however, read like early, perhaps autobiographical efforts: descriptions of a boy growing up in Chicago, playing baseball, being a youthful revolutionary. In trying to depict the momentous within the mundane, Ardizzone must narrow his vision, and risk losing the reader. Otherwise, Ardizzone (Heart of the Order) demonstrates a fine understanding of human vulnerability.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review"Most of the eleven short stories are set in Ardizzone's native Chicago and at that in the gritty, ethnic sections of the city in whose wards the likes of Mayor Daley, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren would be spiritually at home....These are tough, menacing stories in which fate and memory exercise their Hardylike sway, all narrated in a variety of inventive and accomplished voices."  --The San Francisco Examiner"The stories in The Evening News include rich, detailed reminiscences of his family's history, memories of growing up Catholic in Chicago, moving adolescent dramas, plus '60s-style Nabokovian black humor and irony....Ardizzone mines fresh fictional veins and displays a stunning stylistic range.  These stories are encouraging in the best sense of the word.  Things that matter are at stake.  In his willingness to take on powerful subjects, Mr. Ardizzone is almost too hot for the cooled-out '80s." --The Washington Times"The short story is enjoying a remarkable renaissance, attracting young writers who are crafting tales as fine as those of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Updike and Cheever.  Among the best of these young writers is Tony Ardizzone, author of two novels and now a fine collection of short fiction, The Evening News....Ardizzone writes a strong, spare prose that quickly sketches characters and situations, yet his work is invested with a deep humanism that compels the reader to see his characters as people -- people you care about." --The Seattle Times"Ardizzone's style and method of narration vary with each story, so we never feel that we're being treated with more of the same. Though deceptively simple on the surface, his stories require close attention because they ripple with understated meanings and effects that striate the surface texture....In short, he touches on life as he has experienced and observed it and then dives beneath the surface, but always with a kind of grace and style that marks him as a thoughtful and skilled practitioner of the art of fiction."  -- Remark"So much of what gets written about big cities concerns only the extremes -- the filthy rich and the dirt poor. With few exceptions, writers routinely ignore the vast expanse of situations and characters in between.  Count Tony Ardizzone, who was born and raised on Chicago's North Side, among the exceptions. His collection of eleven short stories, The Evening News, strikes at the heart of working-class and middle-class urban living."  -- The Chicago Tribune“This first-rate first collection of short fiction is blessed by several shining moments of epiphany in the most routine settings...All the stories are intensely told and skillfully written. Ardizzone has a special capacity for appreciating the values of home and family, of ethnic pride and humor, and of street smarts. These stories are worth having and knowing well.”— Chicago Magazine