Review: The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934, by David Means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Means

David Means is an American writer based in New York. Many of his short stories have been published. Critics compare him to Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. He is a professor of English Literature, and he teaches at Vassar College.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/10/25/101025fi_fiction_means?currentPage=all 

The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934, by David Means, appears in the October 25, 2010 issue of THE NEW YORKER.

David Means paints word pictures quickly, as though he must get them down before they vaporize. He shrinks time so deftly that 40 decades slide by without any resistance.

He tells a simple story of two FBI agents on a stake-out. It is the dynamics between the younger and older agents that intrigue. The older agent reads the weather and the landscape of the farm to determine when the fugitive might appear. The younger agent tries to form the world with words and misses the signs.

The phrasing creates a palpable tension, as the reader waits for the fugitive to appear around the tumbleweed, through an eerily quiet cat road.

Means pits the older, experienced agent against the horizon. The lawman admits that sometimes the horizon wins.

The older agent enumerates the facts he knows to be true: A, B, C... It is funny and right somehow that this is how he thinks, in tabs; it is the mind of a police officer.

It is a beautiful sad story, elemental in its theme of man against nature. The story does not seem worn but timeless. I loved it.