Review by Mack Hassler
“The World was all before them , where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide
… hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden [they] took their solitary way.”
Paradise Lost, Book 12
Buege’s work reminds me of Percival Everett who just now, we learn, has won the 2025 Pulitzer for his novel James. I am impressed by the style in these stories. They have the same gastropod feel that we get in Genesis as Adam and Eve are sent out of the Garden in the last book of Milton’s great poem which is my epigraph above. Like the spinoff from Mark Twain, our new Pulitzer novel changes voice and style to match situations. Buege’s collection reads like an animal book and a very strange animal, a gastropod slug. In fact, he calls it “a book for non-readers” as he blurbs his own book on the back cover. I do not know Buege well. But I do know he does a lot of work for UP literature, and I have head his raspy voice that hardly sounds elegantly Miltonic though Milton himself, of course, lost his sight to disease that did not stop his work. None of us are any longer in Paradise where the Angels can help us shape prose elegantly. The other image from the Old Testament that I like so much as we think about writing books is the Tower of Babel that God destroyed when it looked to him as though Men and Women were beginning to be able to write like Angels In any case. Buege does not write like an Angel even though he has several award-winning books. I think Amorous Spotted Slug for State Slug: And Other Stories right from the title itself declares itself to be written in the style of a slug. This is an animal of mollusces that is mushy and soft. Most mollusces are gastropods, that is they “walk on their stomach; and that is the name Buege gives his publishing house. This is blatant commercialism and hardly very artistic or literary at all. I like the candor. It fits the roughness and mushiness of much Yooper writing. I would not recommend it to a student or for imitation. It is pure Buege and has the feel of the earth.
One of the most successful pieces in the collection is a long story near the end of what he calls “A Yooper War.” It reminds me of some of the messy writing about the Vietnam War, which was very slug oriented in the sense that the fighting seemed to go on forever in the swamp grass as heliocopters above beat up the swamp grass and made it even more sluggish. Buege creates a wonderful parallel along the Seney Stretch and models the battles more on the American Civil War where Yoopers are trying to secede from Michigan and have to land and move through swampy marches, not tropical like Nam, but rather frigid and sluggish with snowmobiles, But it is an equally sluggish battlefield and clearly suggestive of that terrible period in our own National History. He includes a short poem called “The Wall” (p 57) that is about the Vietnam period I would say the overall tone and style of the collection fits well with what we know of his own physical fear that he would lose his entire ability to speak as well as the huge mess of Vietnam.
Buege at the end and right after the section of the Yooper Civil War pushes his juvenile novel that is often listed as one of his award winners Chogan and the Gray Wolf by saying that, if you are a non-reader and have finished this collection, you should be ready for his longer fictions. He writes, “Chogan who lives … one hundred years before Columbus (Chogan is 12) rescues an ophan wolf pup and raises it to adulthood. When he releases the wolf to the wild the wolf returns to save Chogan’s life.” (p147). This is an elegant, bookish style. The whole collection here is much more casual and mollusc-like in its presentation. At the very opening, he suggests that “Yoopers” got the name when some slugs floated the whole distance from the far South Seas riding on coconuts up and around the original seaway path that the French had found down past Montreal and over to Mackinac Island. They dismounted their coconnuts and declared “Yoop—Pee” (p 3). From start to finish, then, Buege has great range in style. He has not lost his voice at all. He is a voice for our literature.
The Amorous Spotted Slug for State Slug: And Other Stories by Larry Buege (Gastropod Publishing, Ridgewood Drive, Marquette MI) 151 pages, pbk, n.p.
