University of Wisconsin Press, released Mar 2025, 232 pp.
In a collection that spills over with a brawling love for the working class, Dustin Hoffman’s Such a Good Man takes readers on a tour of America’s rural families. From the opening story, “In Darkness Floating,” to the final selection “The Night the Stars Fell,” Hoffman’s stories revolve around a sense of being adrift. We drive, but go nowhere. We make loops and return to where we began. We are trapped within our decaying bodies, caught in systemic poverty, and broken by familial rupture.
The title story, “Such a Good Man” is arguably the strongest in the collection. Eggy, the main character, is working at a carnival when a child goes missing and Eggy is tasked with the responsibility of finding the child. Hoffman builds tension in the piece by threading two timelines, weaving between the present carnival scene and Eggy’s past, when she was abusing drugs and gave up her child for adoption. While we wait for the lost child to be found, we’re equally anxious to learn Eggy’s backstory, where her ex was determined to find the child that he never had a chance to father. He got angry with Eggy when he learned that the child was adopted, complaining, “[t]hat’s my love you gave away.” We become antsy as we realize the lengths he may be willing to go to recover his child from the adoptive parents, threatening to “track him down” or “use his guys.”
In this way, the text demands that we worry about both of these children simultaneously, while also growing more invested in the potential harm Eggy may be facing if she cannot recover the child at the carnival. Her boss places the responsibility for the lost child on Eggy as a way to appease the angry parents, using her as a combination of scapegoat and rescuer. He knows that given her drug history she is vulnerable, and a misstep could cost Eggy her tenuous job—the one keeping her from relapsing into her old life. Hoffman is offering up a commentary on work, noting the ways in which menial jobs can be demanding, yet offer little compensation and no regard for the employee’s well-being. At the same time, Hoffman nimbly portrays the fierceness of parental love matched with the humanness of error, showcasing how it crosses lines of class. Families are a vulnerable unit, fraught with loss.
Hoffman’s stories are obsessed with families, labor, and the decline of the body. In “Essentials,” grocery store employees are working during the early days of the COVID pandemic, panicking at every sneeze and unmasked cough. The workers also contemplate their potential risk for assault, noting “last week, we had six customers threaten to shoot us for wearing masks,” yet they keep coming to work despite these threats because they have families at home relying on their pay. Even as the body is at risk, the job must continue because this is the only way these characters have to put food on their tables.
The decline of the body is felt repeatedly throughout this collection. In “Bicuspid,” parents grieve the loss of their child by occasionally reuniting and tearing out each other’s teeth. In visceral detail we are told, “[b]lood ringed their wrists once they plucked them free. The roots stretched long as nightmares with sharp, cruel claws. They each pressed the other’s tooth into their own throbbing sockets.” This act seems to stand in place of a more traditional show of affection and love; it also appears to be a way of managing the anger associated with grief. The body is a repeated site of vulnerability, angst, and grisly horror. Our characters are ill, dying, or grieving their dead. Our characters are violating the bodies of those around them.
However, the body is also a site of mordant humor. “Too Bad for Marcel Ronk” features empty-nesters who have separated, but chosen to remain in the same house. Marcel has had an affair that he deems meaningless, but now he’s jealous of his wife who appears to be interested in an affair for the sake of revenge. Marcel slips and falls in the snow while taking out the garbage as his wife invites the vacuum salesman into their former bedroom to vacuum the drapes. In these moments, Hoffman’s slapstick events paint masculinity as buffoonish, whereas femininity holds a kind of dangerous lure. The comparison is clear in the narration that follows the wife’s decision not to sleep with the salesman, despite his direct offer of sex. When presented with the opportunity “[s]he wants to slap this stupid man for assuming sex to be like an accident they could stumble into, like strangers on an ice rink, both falling and flailing against gravity until mutual collapse. Accident is excuse. She wants intent.” Meanwhile, her ridiculous husband has literally slipped on the ice outdoors, just as he deems his affair as a random accident. The men’s desires are haphazard and foolish, whereas the women exert control.
We see this masculine buffoonery again in “The Whites,” a story about male house painters who achieve camaraderie through pranking and harassing each other. Here, we revisit the idea of hard manual labor as the price the body must pay in order to make a living, even if it’s a meager one. The story is seemingly about the hilarity of a painter who just bought his all-white uniform and accidentally sits in brown paint, but there is also an interrogation of the labor system. Hoffman writes, “Any swap of labor for uniform is injustice.” The men are aware of this but remain trapped in the system. They cope with their frustrations through jeers and pranks that often go too far. This is how they form a kind of awkward intimacy that allows them to preserve their facade of gruffness. It’s less dramatic than the act of pulling teeth in “Bicuspid,” but it shares the notion of a touch of cruelty within closeness and the notion of masculinity as absurd, as shown in “Too Bad for Marcel Ronk.”
“Privy” showcases this fragile masculinity by introducing Bill, a plumber who is fixing a toilet in a women’s bathroom at the Second Presbyterian Church. A woman discovers Bill when she comes in and uses the toilet in another stall. After completing a phone call with her husband in which she takes him to task over custody of their children, she confronts Bill, mistaking him for a voyeur. She yells at him for his seeming perversion, then she steals his most expensive tool as a punishment. Bill appears clownish attempting to recover the tool, a pipe expander. The humor of the sexual innuendo of this tool is enhanced by her seemingly Freudian theft of it. Hoffman writes, “this woman’s words felt like the tightening nut of his pipe wrench. Bill was now serving as proxy for the fire of her “husband hatred.” It’s clear to Bill that she’s in charge, providing another example of women taking the upper hand as the men appear hapless. Though this dynamic drives much of the humor in this story and throughout the collection, revenge is not the same as equity.
For instance, in “The First Woman,” we meet Winona. She’s in charge of a construction job site populated by male workers. She is equated with the continuation of job opportunities for the men, but also noted for her attractiveness. The men see this as endowing her with power and she becomes a sexual fantasy for them. They note, “we would estimate the number of buttons popped open, cleavage exposed to the sun.” When Pike makes repeated attempts to introduce himself to her as a potential admirer, she blows him off in increasingly violent ways. The cartoonish violence is amped up by the knowledge that all of the men leer longingly at Winona, who is too tough and untouchable to give them the time of day. The men are cast as mere admirers, thwarted by the more powerful woman. While Winona has her revenge, it seems possible that the absurdity of the men might act as an apology for their bad behavior. Portraying male characters as dim-witted and therefore comical, can feel like a denial of the reality of rape culture. If leering men are just buffoons, then the fear of assault that women experience is rendered absurd. Men are too childlike to be dangerous. In these moments, women might be lionized as strong, but male accountability feels lacking and this spoils the joke.
Hoffman does better with female characters elsewhere, such as his depiction of Eggy in “Such a Good Man,” and his depiction of the daughter in “In Darkness Floating.” In this story, a father and daughter drive a cherry picker through Paw Paw, Michigan on the 2024 presidential election night. They contemplate a business together, even as the daughter wonders about her mother who has left for Costa Rica to be an artist. The daughter is also artistic and she feels some envy for her mother’s life, even as she feels the pull to stay with her father and build his business alongside him. She contemplates her fate post-election as she rides in the bucket of the cherry picker. She notes, “[i]f Trump won again, then what’s down there is no place for me—a dropout ceramicist, a woman worker, hell, a woman.” As this collection is published post-election, these kinds of statements feel not only timely, but necessary. Hoffman successfully captures a moment in our history and grants the daughter the insight to name our collective fears.
In many ways, Such a Good Man feels like a collection suffocated by the exhaust fumes of its characters, desperately trying to escape the harsh realities of the world. The stories ache with broken families, bodies, and dreams. Even as the collection begins, it feels like an ending. Taking place on the night of the 2024 presidential election, we are readers in the aftermath. We know what these characters do not yet know about their fate in a post-election world. By the close of the book, “The Night the Stars Fell,” we have witnessed the stars fall and the night turn black. The stars that are so often equated with wishes, navigation, and fate have all failed. The characters, at a loss for what comes next, get into the car, the engine revving in the stillness of the garage. They contemplate surrendering to the exhaust fumes, but instead they decide to go for a drive. There is nowhere to go. The future cannot be imagined even as far ahead as the morning. Hoffman pushes his reader into uncomfortable spaces, asks us to observe them, to leer at them, and perhaps to laugh. Then he reminds us, we have nowhere to go. In a collection that is punctuated with caustic humor, Such a Good Man emerges as a serious collection with much to say about our dying American dream.
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Sarah Sorensen (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. Sarah has been published over 70 times in lit mags, but her most recent work can be found in The Jet Fuel Review, In Parentheses, The Route 7 Review, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal. Sometimes she daydreams about rescuing every shelter dog in Metro Detroit, but she just has one tiny fireball of barks and an unstoppable cat son. She meditates, does yoga, and otherwise works at a low-key life filled with high-key art.
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