What Reviewers Have
Said About:
Father's Mechanical Universe
"Father’s Mechanical Universe is a marvelously fresh take on
the age-old theme of the painfully ambiguous relationship of father and son.
There is a powerful irony in the fact that the silence that separates Frank and
Curly Kellerman is also the force that binds son to father forever. Narrated by
son Curley in a voice that never falters from the right tone, this fiction has
all the grit of Oklahoma, and all the hard substance of Frank Kellerman's
cluttered workshop. And the metaphors of automobile and open road wonderfully
convey the novel's profundity. A balance of the mundane and the mysterious the
Crow Woman! Steve Heller, like the legendary Mantle and Maris, swings for the
fence, never playing it safe."
–Gordon Weaver
"Lucky Kellerman's best piece of luck is in having Steve Heller as his
interpreter. The silences of the taciturn father, the oedipal urges of the
visionary son, and the patience of the woman who bears with them through
everything become eloquent under Heller's tender comedic gaze. Heller's
rough-and-tender portrait of Curly Kellerman and his car-obsessed father is
deeply American, contemporary, and shimmering with mythic life. When Curly takes
a baseball bat to the headlights of his father's beloved machines, you think of
Oedipus, and worry, as you should, about what's coming next. Yukon, Oklahoma,
and this family in particular, are transformed by Heller's magic."
–Marjorie Sandor
"In Father’s Mechanical Universe, the American Dream is a quart
low and the Kellerman family has to use all its ingenuity, wit, and love to keep
its motor running. Steve Heller has written a touching, elegiac book that races
with 120-octane insight."
–Brent Spencer
"Though I read Steve Heller's Father’s Mechanical Universe in a
single afternoon, I'm certain its magical scenes will linger in my thoughts for
years to come. And the ending is perfect."
–David Huddle
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What Reviewers Have
Said About:
The Automotive History of
Lucky Kellerman
This beautifully paced, captivating novel ascends
toward mythic heights and a magical, wholly unexpected conclusion.
–Publishers Weekly
A moving novel, filled with genuine surprises,
very gracefully written.
–USA Today
"On his sixty-fifth birthday," begins
Steve Heller’s ingenious first novel, "Frank Kellerman locked
himself inside an old stone schoolhouse filled with honey bees." With
only the bees to talk to, the former master mechanic begins to re-examine
and reconstruct his life as he works on his final project, the restoration
of a classic Model 18 Ford Deluxe Roadster. The car is meant as a gift for
his estranged son, Curly, a TV game-show ghost, whose alienation parallels
his own fearful rejection by an authoritarian parent. Heller has drawn a
remarkable portrait of the bitter remnants of a failed life and of Lucky
Kellerman’s extraordinary courage and determination in attempting to set
it right.
–New York Newsday
Most haunting is "the pretend season,"
when Frank, trapped in a hip cast, watches day by day through his window
as 10-year-old Curly acts out the progress of the 1961 home run duel
between Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Like a number of vignettes in Mr.
Heller’s quiet and often beautiful book, such unspoken moments between
father and son create an unforgettable image.
–New York Times Book Review
In lesser hands, this novel could have been limp
stuff–maudlin, condescending, or an outline of a personality type. But
Heller writes with understatement and subtlety, filling in Kellerman’s
story with characters and events that are richly emblematic . . . The
story of an old man coming to terms with the death of his hopes and
desires may seem a familiar one, but Heller succeeds in making it new and
strange.
–Cleveland Plain Dealer
Alone, ailing, bereft, an old man barricades
himself in an old abandoned, bee-filled schoolhouse to work on his last
car. He is not really sure why. Working on cars is what he does. What he
is.
Like many a man good with his hands, Kellerman
has never been able to communicate with Curly, the son who has become a
shallow, gaudy TV-game-show host. Each needs the other. Neither can find
the words.
Mutely, then, Kellerman works on his car, his
seventh. His others, still parked by his house, represent the stages of
his life: magic, chaos, hope, joy and fear, shame, despair. For the
seventh, there is no name, just a feeling, a word that meant starting over
and going beyond and more.
Kellerman has not yet stalled out. Heller is just
beginning.
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
Charm is an odd word top use in describing a
serious work of intellect and imagination, but there it is–the book is,
in fact, charming . . . Heller has created a song of the American
proletariat that will be difficult to forget.
–San Antonio Light
In setting the several plots of this excellent
novel in motion and bringing them to a profound stillness at the end,
Heller shows considerable knowledge of the human soul and its quest for
redemption in the presence of a swarm of mysteries.
–Cimarron Review
Kellerman has certainly had his share of wounds,
and his car is an honest moment to Lucky’s suffering and endurance, and
a symbol of the truthfulness and depth of character in this superb novel.
–The
Texas Review
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What Reviewers Have Said
About:
The Man Who Drank a Thousand
Beers
A Hawaiian Winesburg, Ohio is how some readers
may want to see this collection because of the links among all nine
stories: All are set in Hawaii; some have characters in common; and
several concern people trying either to preserve or fend off illusions . .
. But what is really important is that all nine stories contain prose that
is beautifully controlled, displaying carefully chosen details that create
a strong sense of place, and characters about whom the reader can care . .
. This collection (Heller’s first) suggests he has the potential to join
the ranks of such contemporary short story masters as Peter Taylor, Gordon
Weaver, and Raymond Carver.
–The A.I.D. Review
Heller’s characters act out their lives or
dream–especially dream–them in the multiracial insular world of
Hawaii. They spray pineapple fields, cut sugar cane, vacation, wait
tables, park cars for a living. They attempt the impossible, driven by
some private code or cultural influence. Heller’s Hawaii is the real
world of lives in flux, not yet lived, or already lived and lost, now
irretrievable. It is the Hawaii behind the four-color posters of pink
sunsets and golden girls in string bikinis . . . Heller deftly handles the
separations and reconciliations of people set adrift among the islands.
–New Mexico Humanities Review
Heller is a son Chekhov, a proponent of lucidity
and of fidelity to subjects and objects . . . His conceptions of character
come out of a subtilized naturalism . . . In the beautifully autumnal
"The Red Dust of Lanai," Shigeo, the protagonist, cannot break
away with his girlfriend to go even as far as Honolulu. The rituals of
hunting and drinking, the topography of his island, ruinous though it is,
hold him fast. He cannot will to leave, finally. For him imprisonment and
meaning are inseparable. One is reminded of Joyce’s "Eveline."
–The Texas Review
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