I was a little worried that Gary Amdahl's Visigoth would suffer from the engine-light-and-sandwiches affliction.

However, after beginning the first story in the collection, "The Flyweight," I was immediately engrossed. In it, Dennis, a Midwestern high school wrestling champion, suffers an agonizing mental breakdown, and the narrator--his best friend--tells the story with equal parts intimacy and distance. Throughout, Amdahl's imagistic descriptions are marvelous, and as I read, I realized that it's been a long time since I've found a writer with more than a utilitarian use of language. "The Flyweight," like every story in this collection, is tinged with sadness and violence, but Amdahl's gifted at construing and finessing the difference between sadness, desperation, and the flat-out maudlin:

It was true that he was fasting. He fasted recklessly, religiously, not so much to stay under a hundred pounds, but rather to maintain in himself that sense that he was both a good dog, doing his duty, and a computer, binary, no options, win or lose. Too much food and he started feeling sassy, preternatural. The graphed X and Y of energy and weight rose and fell respectively, met at the optimal point, then shot sharply off the chart in two directions. Dennis associated "emaciated" with "meek" and thought that he would continue to inherit the earth either way.

The first four stories in the collection crackle with the same engaging ferocity. There are others, however, that meander. "The Free Fall," which is 58 pages, is long on intensity (and long on long) but lacking the clarity that makes the first four so successful. And I found the ending of the "The Barber Chair," a story about a man coping with the tragedy of a failed sled-dog expedition, to be unsatisfyingly abrupt.

The stories in Visigoth share a number of themes: violence, tragedy, regret. The protagonists are quietly intelligent, careful observers of the human condition. They are also uniformly tough motherfuckers. And of the eight stories, six are told in the first person; it's a style that Amdahl does well, but it gave me pause. How much of this, I wondered, is autobiographical? Naturally, so much of what writers write is tinged with memory and personal experience. Amdahl is deft with imagery and detail; if any of these stories are autobiographical*, he possesses a marvelous ability in recounting them. However, a number of my favorite authors who weave their lives into their writing--Junot Diaz and Ellen Miller spring to mind--seem to have plumbed the depths of their personal histories and, disappointingly, failed to produce much since then.

This criticism aside, Visigoth is a remarkable and breathtaking (though imperfect) collection. I look forward to reading more of Gary Amdahl's work--regardless of its inspiration. As the narrator of "Narrow Road to the Deep North," which was awarded a Pushcart Prize, says, "...I was also a fan of Heroic Violence. I even had a specialty; I was something, I fancied of an after-dinner speaker, a guy who could mouth off while trading blows with pinheads." That's a perfect encapsulation of Amdahl's narrators--and (perhaps) of Amdahl as well.

*To qualify this postulation, I wanted to add that when I asked Milkweed about this, they told me that while he has struggled with similar issues, the stories are fictional. In essence, I could be talking out of my butt. It wouldn't be the first time. (And also, they pointed out that his theater background, which could explain the personal, dramatic feel to his stories.)