Eleven stories by the author of the critically-acclaimed HOW ANIMALS MATE. Daniel Mueller reveals the distance between our everyday masks and the selves we strain to recognize in them. A boy whose parents live apart decides to model himself after a neighborhood sociopath. A corporate systems analyst attempts to reconcile a homoerotic childhood with his conventional nuclear family. A divorcee … dating a rape survivor must admit that what he loves most about her would, in his daughter, completely destroy him. Funny and grim, stylish and provocative, these stories find in disjunction and misalignment unparalleled tension and exquisite grace. Advance praise from Peter Ho Davies: “Daniel Mueller is a true American original, his raucous, ribald vision (call it sub-division surreal) at once chokingly funny, and fiercely felt. These stories move from gut-busting to gut-churning to gut-wrenching in the blink of an eye, uncovering along the way the tender in the grotesque, the lovely in the lurid, and the soul in suburbia. Mueller – big-hearted and fearless as he is – has long been one of my cult writers. Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey should give many new readers the chance to discover him.”
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Dan Mueller’s collection of stories, Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey, presents an unforgettable cast of damaged characters who grope to reconstruct and make sense of their worlds. We relate to these people through shared humanity, recognizing, perhaps against our will, something of ourselves in each of them.
Among these tortured souls and “garden-variety” fuckups we find a boy at puberty’s threshold, seeking acceptance through a dangerous friendship that will scar him for life; a sexually adventurous and gifted adolescent, fascinated with politics, whose struggles with accepting himself continue into adulthood, largely as a result of his father’s rejection; a pair of young-adult sisters who develop unconventional mechanisms for coping with the protracted illness and death of their parents; a smart but miserable couple expecting a child, who unwittingly place their relationship of ten years in the crucible of a wedding party whose attendees have prospered through unsavory connections; a detective who, through misplaced motives and affections, struggles to construct a life after the unsolved disappearance of his preteen daughter; a seven-year-old boy, fascinated with snakes, whose innocence is destroyed when he witnesses a horrific rodeo accident and the disappointing behavior of his philandering father; a jaded professor whose fiancé, a beautiful rape victim, mysteriously attracts men, forcing him to realize that he “loved something in her” that he never wanted to see in his daughter; a college dropout hiking in Yellowstone—fantasizing and making up stories to project a free-spirited lifestyle—who gets more than he bargained for after hooking up with a couple whose marriage is on the brink of disaster.
The strongest piece, “I’m OK, You’re OK,” originally published in The Missouri Review, is more memoir than fiction. In it, Mueller places himself in the role of damaged protagonist, trying to construct a life from broken fragments. Ironically it takes the memory of a perverted clown in a Plymouth station wagon to establish the perspective through which Mueller can appreciate the gifts accrued through fearless contemplation of failures and mistakes. During a birthday party for his five-year-old daughter—thirty years after Mueller’s encounter with the clown—his father says, “That day you left us to hitchhike to Alaska, surely you couldn’t have imagined that one day all of this would be yours.” His father was referring to the life Mueller had “cobbled together out of nothing more than a desire to write.” For Mueller to write is to give of himself, buried chunks that are exhumed through blood and pain, the sharing of which gives life to these stories that evoke a full range of emotion.
OMG! we think from the safety of our reading chairs. Saddened and disturbed, we indulge ourselves in cathartic laughter, chuckling as Mueller peels back layer after layer of masked-over pain to reveal hardened kernels of humanity, waiting for grace and receiving it in surprising ways. The elegant prose that constitutes these gems crackles with dark humor, witty dialogue, and irony. Dan Mueller, who also penned the prize-winning collection, How Animals Mate, has given us an ambitious collection that forces us to look at our own lives and ask difficult questions, a process that just might move us closer to acceptance of ourselves and others.