Dustin M. Hoffman's stories (One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist) are ballads for the working class who toil in the shadows, Studs Terkel's "walking wounded." In No Good for Digging, 31 short tales include the weirdly fantastical (magicians, Ouija board inspectors, diviners) as well as the everyday (plumbers, salesmen, prostitutes). All are treated with the same reverence, as they try to grind out a living against the odds and sometimes against each other.
Many of these tales are poignant metaphors for the cruelties of surviving, the risks taken and the wrongs done to eke forward and protect one's own. The opener, "A Nesting," sets the stage formidably in two short yet crushing paragraphs. Construction of a home has trapped a nest of birds behind the sheetrock. Wielding hammers, each trade points the finger at another and proceeds with their own assigned task, ignoring the sounds of "baby wings fluttering in tangles of pink fiberglass insulation," the house to be "forever haunted by hollow bones and black feathers."
Destructive work ethics and expectations are masterfully explored in "On the Strongest Man Compound," where the Strongest Man is shrinking. He shrugs it off and continues to lift, but still diminishes, to the horror of his fellow Strongest Men. They add weight and reps to his routine, then ponder their reputations and his exile when he keeps shrinking under the burden.
With thanks to those who did and didn't survive building houses with him, Hoffman, a former tradesman and current associate professor of English at Winthrop University, does the trades proud with these empathetic reflections of his experience. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review