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by R. F. McEwen (Author)
R.F. McEwen's The Big Sandy is a splendid imaginative feat that calls to mind the work of three Irish masters: Sterne, Joyce, and Beckett. Like the best literary novels, The Big Sandy is both highly allusive and hugely engaging. While encased in a thoroughly-destroyed Plymouth Fury (read: Michael Fury, an invisible yet ever-present character in Joyce's The Dead) in the heart of Nebraska's Sandhills, McEwen's hapless duo survive by inventing an imaginary landscape and a peopled world that draws on Ireland and America. Linguistically, The Big Sandy occupies a space between both countries while absorbing from both. McEwen's heroes, Jodey and Flann, resemble Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon-they are trapped and hoping for deliverance. At the same time, both men are caught inside their own narratives: McEwen reminds us that all lives are stories and that most storytellers report unreliably on their own lives. The Big Sandy, a most-exciting genre defying novel/drama, is the work of a master storyteller.
Author Biography
R. F. McEWEN was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1945. Since 1962 he has been a professional logger and tree trimmer, working trees throughout the United States as well as in, during the late 1960's, Guyana, South America. In 1972 he began teaching Middle School English in Chadron, Nebraska, and is currently a professor of English at Chadron State College. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Kansas Quarterly, The Prairie Schooner, Melville Extracts and in The Yellow Nib.
