Book Review: Readings

Radio Elvis and Other Stories

TCU Press, 197 pp., $22.50
John H. Irsfeld teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He is a man of many parts: ex-soldier, novelist, and, more to the point, a wonderful storyteller. The title story of this collection is a graceful and imaginative leap into the life of Elvis Presley if he were alive today. Since age has changed his appearance, he palms himself off at a convention of Elvis impersonators as a "radio Elvis" impersonator. The story is funny, moving, and vivid.

There are 16 stories in this collection, with a third of them in a section subtitled "Dreamland." Here we experience the anguish and apprehension of the married couple who suffer a visit from the authorities in "Marriage Auditors." The story is both funny and poignant in its cataloging of the trivia of daily domestic life.

Irsfeld captures the lives of the grifters and drifters, losers and loners of the Nevada desert in a section subtitled "Las Vegas." In "Finderskeepers," we meet an old desert rat named J.L. who quite literally expends his dying breath in playing an elaborate practical joke on an officious bureaucrat he has come to hate. By the end of the story, the reader teeters precariously between laughter and tears. Irsfeld writes of lonely men, poor men, men without women, the marginalized men who are at once invisible and ubiquitous.

In "The Chance" we meet men whose friendships grow from the simple act of meeting at bars around town for the daily drink and food specials -- "like the shrimp cocktail special at the Golden Gate ..." We meet Las Vegas gamblers who first came to town on the Greyhound regularly from Southern California and who moved permanently nearer to the slot machines when they retired. Irsfeld shows us a gritty Las Vegas far from the glittering gaming tables of the high rollers.