Book Review

'Twilight Innings'

Short essays show strength, sensitivity of author

Robert A. Fink
Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival
Texas Tech University Press, 2006
Hardback, $24.95

By Donald Mace Williams

Robert A. Fink is an ex-marine, a Vietnam vet. He rides a motorcycle, runs marathons, loves baseball, and I gather has been in his share of fights, maybe not always purely in self-defense.

He is also a poet and the director of creative writing at that very Baptist school, Hardin-Simmons University, and when he says a bad word—not once but twice!—after banging himself up in a fall while running, he prays for forgiveness as, bleeding, he stumbles on.

His collection of 24 short essays brings out the strength and sensitivity you would expect of such a man, but also, and overriding those qualities, a notable warmheartedness.

From his childhood impressions of a barbershop to his anguished responses to the deaths of friends, of fellow marines and even of young women in a century-old fire, Fink gives us a piece-by-piece memoir that grows subtly in power and connectedness until its deeply moving end.

"Twilight Innings" is by no means all somber, but the lighthearted tone of many of the first essays seems to darken in retrospect as the writing takes on more and more poignance. The style changes, too, from the easygoing talkiness of old-time newspaper style to an impressionistic artfulness that comes close to poetry.

Here, for instance, is Fink writing about the region he adopted when he took the Abilene job in 1977:

"West Texans don't have to work at being laconic or enigmatic. It comes with the open territory, with not needing to say much or bother explaining what we say. We know what matters: faith—how we need a lot of it, and love—how we mostly feel about each other and this land people who don't know better refer to as 'godforsaken.' Of course, most Abilenians don't go around saying love out loud. That's the poet's job."

And here, by contrast, is the Vietnam vet remembering a young marine who was killed:

"Not dead. Maybe not dead, not where all the flowers, young girls, young men, marines of yesteryear have gone . . . into darkness, old friend, lying down in De-troit City, prayers of going home answered, that melting—MacArthur Park, Aquarius, Alice, come on, baby, light my pyre, a wonderful world waiting as a husbandman for the early rain and the latter rain, not the rain filling indentations of boots sucked up from mud, filling the valleys of poncho liners, pouring over the rim of helmets like the lip of front-porch roofs back home where the tall boy prayed to go, back to his beautiful, brownie-baking wife, feast of earlobe and neck, breast and belly, underside of thigh, back to a place where one actually prayed for rain, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit."

The rhythms of the King James edition are in that sample, and they appear often in the collection. Motorcycle images also appear: “the twin cam 88 balanced engine growling, throbbing as if all the hearts of the good dead were beating in sync, lifting the rider above dark streets, disembodied, one with the machine trailing a blood-deep laugh in its wake."

That one is overdone on purpose—Fink is laughing at his own dream of owning a Harley. A more frequent source of imagery is the one that in a book called "Twilight Innings" you would naturally expect. Fink's father, a sandlot pitching star, taught him baseball from childhood on. In his first Little League game, Fink walked the first four batters, then gave up a base-clearing hit. When he finally, somehow, got the side out, “The coach called my father from the stands. . . . My father sat down beside me in the dugout, wrapped both arms around me, and said I was doing great; I would settle down; the team would come back.

"I returned to the mound and somehow finished the game. I don't remember batting. I don't remember getting anyone out. What I remember is my father holding me each half inning."

This is a fine collection for reading on airplanes. The essays, though you see at the end that they all have the same DNA, also stand alone, and most of them can be read in the time between “We are now starting our descent" and “Please wait for the captain to turn off the seat belt sign."

The book contains some deplorable misspellings and departures from standard English—“snuck," “I prayed each night before I lay me down to sleep" (my italics), “the tom . . . flairs his tail," “chinkapin," “madronne," “clinched teeth," "I'm feeling nauseous," “two burley guys"—but it is unfortunately true that holding a Ph.D. in English, as Fink does, no longer certifies that a writer has micrometer perceptions where usage is concerned. Hate the sin, then, but mutter a bad word or two and forgive the sinner.

A man as forgiving as Fink deserves no less, and this book is, on balance, decidedly a keeper. An added attraction is the fluent, genially analytical foreword by R. S. Gwynn.

Donald Mace Williams, a Canyon resident, is the author of the novel “Black Tuesday's Child."

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Posted: August 30, 2007