From Publishers Weekly
Set in the rough neighborhoods of South Boston,
This Thing Called Courage
is a collection of seven moving stories
dealing with sexual desire among young,
working-class Irish Catholic men.
Author J.G. Hayes does an excellent job of
capturing the conflicting emotions of his characters
as they wrestle with "some bastard child of... shame and desire."
In "Jimmy Callahan, Married, Three Kids,"
a firefighter is drawn to a widowed co-worker;
the narrator of "The Rain" suffers a breakdown
after a beloved friend plummets to his death;
and in the title story,
a repairman recalls an ill-fated affair
with his high school gym teacher.
These stories, often bleak but always deeply moving,
are a welcome addition to the Boston Irish subgenre of hard-knocks fiction.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Characters' streams of
consciousness and pop-cultural memories collide and
overlap in Hayes' impressive stories about South Boston,
where a cool D-Street boy would rather die
than be thought of as a "faggot,"
and its resident "southies."
In "Regular Flattop,"
one death conflicts with another,
leaving a teen boy bereft,
struggling to honor a promise made to his dying father
and torn by his desires to live authentically.
In "This Thing Called Courage," a butch 30-ish dude proves,
seemingly unaccountably,
capable of sophisticated recognitions of
Aubusson carpets and pricey Balinese masks
in the patrician condo to which he comes to fix the heat;
but then he has an anxiety attack,
because this apartment was once his high-school locker room,
scene of the reason for his anxiety.
The gentrifying neighborhood cracking down
on the guys from the nearby projects is
the background for the characters' worlds of internal torment and hope.
After such an auspicious debut,
we impatiently await Hayes' next effort. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Publisher: Haworth Press
