In the opening story of Jason Brown's startling and impressive first collection, a hospital delivery driver (and one-time armed robber) describes an attempt to deliver a heart to a transplant operation on time. His mission is unsuccessful and in the end he can only wearily admit that "there is no way for me to explain how we could have driven all this way with a heart for which, in the end, there is no life". This is typical of the quiet desperation that runs through Brown's stories, and, at the same time, of the resignation with which his characters face and live through it.
Hospitals feature largely here, as crossroads of sorts, where life and death, sanity and madness, hope and despair intersect. Whether places to escape from, as in `Animal Stories' and `Detox', or insufficient havens from the chaos of life, they provide a suitably banal yet unsettling backdrop for Brown's stories, the perfect starting point for his forays into the peripheries of society. But then, with a cast of largely unhinged characters, chances are some of the action is going to end up in hospital - in fact, hospital humour might be the best way of describing the black comedy that sometimes runs just below the surface of the narrative. Brown's characters make up a motley crew indeed: alcoholics, drug addicts, dropouts and the mentally-ill people the pages of Driving The Heart, leaving a trail of personal tragedy, car wrecks and dysfunctional families in their wake.
Anyone familiar with Denis Johnson's short stories will recognise this sleazy underbelly of middle America and the often eerie snapshots of its respectable small towns. Furthermore, they'll appreciate Brown's spare and elegant writing, his taut storytelling and emotional sensitivity. In the end, it's these qualities that give Driving The Heart its thrust; more to the point, they make its author a worthy and gifted chronicler of that most-maligned phenomenon - modern America.