Islands, Women, and God by Paul
Ruffin
Fine Stories Of Men's World
Islands, Women, and God is a collection of stories of sacrifice and
courage set in the South. The stories are populated with incredibly
authentic universal characters who rise out of their regional milieu, whose
world is the human heart, as real as our very own. The work is
reminiscent of Flannery OConnor, William Goyen and Faulkner.
Personal Review: Islands, Women, and God by Paul Ruffin
Fine stories of men's world
By ERIC MILES WILLIAMSONISLANDS, WOMEN, AND GOD.
By Paul Ruffin.
Browder Springs, $24.95 hardcover,

$16.95 paperback. PAUL Ruffin, poet, short-story writer and professor at
Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, writes about Texas and the
Gulf Coast so well that his new story collection is likely to define the literary
territory for many years to come.
The 17 stories in the collection are about common people, folks from
Texas and Mississippi who live quiet and humble lives -- factory workers,
farmers, fishermen, husbands and wives and youngsters and oldsters.
Although the characters are common people, the book is not. These
stories are masterful, every line honed and tight and true, the sentences
spoken by the characters in phrases we've often before heard but never
before seen on the page. Ruffin's work has been compared with that of
William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, but his stories are not derivative.
Rather, they're part of the new wave of Southern fiction generally and
Texas fiction specifically, a wave that includes Southerners such as Barry
Hannah, Padgett Powell, Chris Offutt and Charlie Smith, and Texas writers
such as Glenn Blake and Tracy Daugherty. Not insignificantly, Ruffin
occasionally pays tribute to Cormac McCarthy, a Southerner-turned-Texan
like Ruffin himself. Islands, Women, and God is a man's book about the
world of men. The stories center on the conflicts inherent in the stifled,
brutal and often senseless world of masculinity. Manhunt, the opening
story, is about the apprehension of an escaped convict. The hunters of the
convict are local men who normally spend their days selling cars and
working for insurance companies, these otherwise calm men turned into
bloodthirsty bigots and would-be killers, the manhunt a legal excuse to do
what they would be doing were there not the constructs of "civil" society.
Underpinning our culture is a violence that needs very little to turn
supposedly peaceful family men into primordial beasts, Ruffin seems to
say. In Tattered Coat Upon a Stick, Ruffin writes of an aging man who,
rather than live out his days in senility and helplessness, emasculated,
chooses to return to the family property in the country and end his life
properly and with dignity. His end is far from morbid or maudlin, but instead
glorious and beautiful. Interloper relates the tale of a family man who
discovers a burglar in his house and takes care of him. Just before the
protagonist of the story meets the burglar, Ruffin writes, No, it is nothing
that would warrant calling the police or awakening your wife, nothing to
justify wrenching off a table leg and swinging it wildly through the dark. But
it is more than simply nothing. So you must summon whatever resolve you
are capable of and go down the stairs into the cold darkness of what a few
hours earlier was your warm and well-lit den. You are in charge -- it is your
house, your domain, and while your wife and children sleep you must
stand watch if there is a threat. This is the law. A very old one. When
Ruffin's men pop, when their natures surface, he is there with some of the
most perceptive and powerful observations in American literature, or any
literature for that matter. One of the best stories in the collection, The Sign,
shows the brutality of father to son and son to father. At the beginning of
the story we find a description of the father beating his son: "I will beat your
skin off, boy. You hold still." And the belt came down time and time again
on his back, lapping around his protruding ribs like a devil's tongue, then

curling about his legs, snapping until all the feeling went away and there
was only sound, only sound -- and he could feel the warm of his blood
trailing down from the welts, seeking its way, gathering and dripping. He
stood like something carved of wax, not feeling the belt but feeling the
blood. He would not cry. He clenched his eyes and teeth, but he would not
cry. The story centers on the father's wedding anniversary and a family
reunion. The son returns home for only the second time in 40 years for the
event. The father is dying of cancer, and the son exacts his revenge in
spectacular and appropriate fashion, not by killing the father but by doing
something far worse and more enduring. The title and final story of the
collection, Islands, Women, and God, is about a man named Ray who
fakes his own death and deserts his wife and children to live on the barrier
islands of the Gulf Coast. He is discovered by a former co-worker and
friend, and the story gives occasion for Ruffin to present a sad and
unfortunately viable solution to the condition of men: solitude and atavism,
regression into an animal state in nature. Ray says, "I'm in harmony, man,
with this island, with this Gulf. I got everything I need out here to live, and
everything's in balance." Later he explains that every man is called to this
state of being: "It comes for every man. ... Every man. Only most don't
know what they're seeing or feeling, or they don't know what to do about it.
I'm telling you, Roger, an old man over there [in society] is, as Yeats says,
just a scarecrow. Out here he's more. He's everything. He's a skull full of
lightning. He's -- he's God, or he's soon going to be, because God is all of
this." We leave the book with Ray on his island and Roger back in
civilization, longing to be living on an island of his own, afraid to do so yet
wanting to do so. Islands, Women, and God is an astonishing book. Every
page is beautifully written, splendidly rendered and bold. Where weaker
writers grow timid and shrivel, Ruffin burrows deep into truths we know but
don't admit to knowing. In a time when American writers seem to strive to
either shock or soothe, Ruffin instead gives us an honest vision of what
lies beneath the veneer of manners and society. He is a master of
language and a peerless teller of tales, and he will surely be known as one
of the best writers of his generation. Eric Miles Williamson is the author of
the novel East Bay Grease and a graduate of the University of Houston's
Creative Writing Program. He lives in Missouri and is at work on his
second novel.
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