Eight Mile High Paperback – July 1, 2014

Jim Daniels’s new book of short fiction, Eight Mile High, collects a series of short stories told in first and third person with scenes from his youth which recall people, family members and friends. As always Daniels prose is rich in delightful sentences where imagination turns into prose and poetry. The notable connection between the characters and places draws the reader’s attention and ignites a curiosity to read on. The scenes are familiar places like garages, middle and high schools, local bars and restaurants. Daniel has been teaching creative writing (poetry, fiction, and screenwriting) at Carnegie Mellon since 1981. A prolific author, his three recently published books Birth Marks, a book of poetry in 2013, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry, in 2011, and Trigger Man, short fiction in 2011, add to his long list of published works. Daniels is a popular instructor at Chautauqua Institution where he enjoys a large group of followers (including myself) who have benefitted from his beneficial and practical instruction. A well-documented fact of mixed feeling of teenagers toward their parents is mirrored in “ET TU” where Daniel begins the story thus: “In the way of teenagers worldwide, I both hated my parents and loved my parents” and where the world smells “like cold church on a weekday morning.” He gives another paradoxical impression of his father in the section where among the “13 ways of looking at” his father, he compares him to both a great chess player and a poker faced man with a losing hand. The beautiful writing continues, “ We waited through dusk and into darkness for him to come home. Home, we mourned like wind. This is exactly how I felt about my father and home when I was at this similar age. Yes, as in “Pearl Diving” the street was our summer camp. Then we read a passage that is more like a lyrical poem than prose, reminiscent of “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks: “We broke things, we set things on fire, we blew things up, we killed bugs and rodent, we brawled and mauled, we cussed and dis-cussed at the volume of low-flying aircrafts. We made trouble.” As in his other work, Daniels’s characters wander Detroit where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem as in, “We made trouble.” However, these characters are happy kids and do not feel sorry for themselves, even when they stumble. They only live and fill their vacuous summer days. In “13-Part Story with Mime,” the narrator enters college and begins to live in Toledo, where he meets artists and falls in love. He writes, “She said something about Monet vs. Manet like it was a Big Time Wrestling match, or maybe I was projecting.” The love stories in this collections are subtle and moving. In this story, learning how to scrape the leaves of artichokes is a metaphor. The narrator writes about hunger and love: “I think she loved my hunger for her.” A proverb says that history repeats itself. This is at least true in Daniels’ last story. Now a father he writes in that “Today I lie on my son’s mattress—he’s fourteen, a freshman at Eight Mile High.” As in his other works, Daniels, in Eight Mile High, shows the power of imagination and tells stories rich with beautiful composition and poetic lines. Thanks to his eidetic memory, Daniels draws pictures of presumably his own past with vivid descriptions that encourage the reader to walk the same path.

This is a collection of short stories, but although the narrators are not the same character from story to story, it reads almost as a novel. About growing up and coming of age in 1950s-1970s Detroit, the book takes a non-nostalgic, clear-headed, sometimes even embittered look at what life was like for a young boy/young man during the glory years of the American automobile industry. Daniels' writing is crisp and yet poetic.

A treasure! Here's a young Steinbeck.

Eight Mile High is a beautifully written and often hilarious linked short story collection that examines the dysfunctional lives of working class people living in Warren Michigan a township south of Detroit whose economy is dominated by the local Ford plant where many of its denizens end up pulling one of the three round the clock shifts.The plant dominates the local economy and it dominates the lives of the people in Warren like a powerful, unavoidable force of gravity. Whether folks want to work there or not; whether first generation college kids seek to break free or not, they are all inevitably drawn back to working at the Ford plant, which is often referred to as simply ‘Ford’, as in, “I got a job at Ford….”Most of the action takes place in the 1970s, and its focus is on the remembered youth of growing up in Warren during the final moment of Detroit’s dominance. It charts the analogue moments in the lives of a generation of auto-workers when the living was still relatively good, before globalization, cell-phones, computers and cheap labor elsewhere destroyed a way of life that now exists only in the memories of people who were there living the life. Fortunately, for all of those people, there is now this book that brings this world to remarkable life with stunning fine grained detail.I now want to pause and say this: I grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, a similar working class community in a northwestern suburb of Chicago and I was struck at how accurately the author recreated the experience of what my life was like in the 1970s when Vietnam Vets were returning home, where fathers worked their asses off in hard-grinding jobs, where the kids, what we called, ‘Burnouts’, skipped out on school and got high or drunk and just did stupid things and died because they flew out of car windows in drunken car accidents, where having fun was beating the crap out of people with funny names like Gerard, and where the most affection you could ever expect to get was a hard punch on the shoulder or a knee kick to the thigh followed by jocular laughter. Eight Mile High captures the profoundly mixed emotions of kids who want to belong to the working class community of Warren and who want to flee it but who also seem to intuit that by fleeing it they will lose the most precious thing of all that the community of Warren has so indelibly given them: their identity. In other words, this book is a rock and roll victory flag, a banner of pride and hurt and joy for anyone raised in working class communities--whether Warren Michigan or Wheeling Illinois--and who lived the life at the final moment before all those working class communities collapsed. Readers from these communities will alternately find themselves laughing with recognition and then, at the same moment, shedding tears saying to themselves all along: Yes, that’s it exactly. That’s how it was—and oh, it’s gone.

Jim Daniels writes an excellent portrayal of no-man's land suburbia that offers no hope for its youth.