In the story collection White Man's Problems, Kevin Morris so masterfully captures the universal angst of his characters it doesn't really matter that his world of white guy lawyers or blue-collar Irish Catholics doesn't reflect the demographics of most of the rest of the world. He is equally adept describing a Malibu lawyer sailing down the Pacific Coast Highway in his Mercedes as he is a suburban Philadelphia working-class Vietnam vet's wake, where "the men had thick necks and jowls and mustaches, and almost every one of them was in his only suit, polyester with pleats... bought on sale at Penney's or Boscov's." A Los Angeles media lawyer and occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post, Morris knows these people.
Sometimes funny, brutally on the money, each of the nine stories in Morris's first fiction collection tracks a white man on the edge--uneasy with his family, his job, his life. Like the first-year legal associate in "Starting Out" who discovers that it's not enough that "he played rugby and went fly-fishing and had bona fide real-man credentials at a time when young men were being called metrosexuals" or the over-stretched Brentwood deal-maker who accidently backs over his family dog in "Mulligan's Travels," each Morris character in some way is "losing his battle to stay fit, which meant losing the battle to stay sharp and distinct, which meant wending his way to old age and dying." Bleak, perhaps, but this is also the work of a major new fiction talent. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.