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To limit Dale Ray Phillips by calling him a Southern Regionalist author would be sinful, but if you have ever longed to know what the insider's perspective looks like then read these stories. The collection is not about the South, though, it's about ordinary people living ordinary lives trying to make sense of the world around them. The stories are hilarious and heart-wrenching as the narrator pieces together events from his life and reflects on the meaning.
This is a "must read." Start immediately.

Dale Ray Phillips knows how to construct a story from the ground up: gorgeous sentences, fully human characters, a deep sense of place. Wonderful. Enough said.

A primer on what's wrong with contemporary American fiction. Okay, you're from the South, but that doesn't make you a good writer. All surface, prose pyrotechnics and slick phraseology...no real characters, story, plot or substance. Reads like a compendium of the worst of college grad student family blues MFA program pap. Faulkner, Hemingway, John O'Hara, Cheever, Flannery O'Conner...even contemporaries like T. Coraghessen Boyle outshine this turkey.

Imagine the American Dream refracted through a shattered kaleidoscope and you will begin to have sense of the life of the significant characters which populate "My People's Waltz," a series of interconnected short stories mainly revolving around the central character, Richard. Divorce, alcohol addiction, domestic violence, ruined trust and unethical business practices compete with dancing in kitchens, genuine affection, teen-age debauches and waterskiing buck naked. Richard, the son, witnesses the dissolution of his parents' marriage; Richard, the husband, participates in the deterioration of his own marriage, and Richard, the father, considers exactly what his own son, Fisher, will remember about the chaos of his own early life.
Dale Ray Phillips is a fine writer, and his style encompasses sympathy for his characters and wisdom as to their circumstances. He describes his characters: "A people like mine were not pleasure-fearing Pilgrims, nor the landed aristocracy of the Virginians who would write the Constitution...We became whatever the new landscape required: reluctant but rum-fortified revolutionary soldiers; willing purveyors of smallpox-infested blankets...traders of horses and human flesh." These "owners of damaged dreams" don't stumble through life; they make war on it. They love hard, recklessly, and without consequence. Their unions, emotional, familial or sexual, are intense and unlasting. They lie, cheat and steal with abandon. But, Philipps makes them appealing to us. Richard, his failed father, his emotionally-damaged mother, his frustrated wife Lisa -- all of them contain that quality of humanity which ultimately bonds them to us. The author provides the best description of his novel: "I wish these wer the stories of people who cavorted more with happiness than with the moments from which they needed rescue...All my people have ever aspired toward was a place where the geography of ourselves made sense."
My sole reservation of the novel derives from the disjointed, and, at times, repetitive nature of the prose. Rather than evolving as a unity, the novel is a bit too episodic, and lacks the cohesiveness of other intgegrated short-story novels. However, this criticism does not diminish my respect for the author nor for the incredibly sensitive portrait he has created for a segment of our population often ridiculed, but seldom understood.

I didn't like it.

Dale Ray Phillips is a great voice in American fiction. Summing up the life of the character he calls Richard, Dale Ray breaks into the broken human heart like a burglar and finds the lost riches there. His characters are lost, deaf, and knowingly unholy in a landscape of mischance, love, and unbearable knowledge. Fathers betray sons as naturally as crappies bite hooks, and lovers try to force each other into different shapes. A forceful collection of stories.

Dale's book, from the word go, is astonishing. His control of of craft is clear. By this, I mean that he understands character's nuance, plot's highs and lows, Bill Harrison's "what is obligatory," and, most of all, the holy necessity of knowing what is holy. Here, find selves with hands thrown from windows on the way to the outer banks. Find crooks and painters and would be horse shoe throwers. And find yourself, caught up in the dazzle of brilliant fiction. Buy this book. Or I'm out now, looking for you.

These linked stories announce a major new voice in American fiction. They investigate through the narrator, Richard, the demise of the American dream at the end of a millennium. Written in prose that takes your breath, I would suggest these stories anyone brave enough to take a hard look at the landscape of loss. To quote the book jacket blurb by Fred Chapel, "My People's Waltz is an experience during which you forget to breath." Highest reccommendations.