McNally, T.M. 1961–

views updated

McNally, T.M. 1961–

(Thomas Michael McNally)

PERSONAL: Born 1961; married Sally Ball (a poet); children: three. Education: Rockford College, B.A.; Arizona State University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Scottsdale, AZ. Office—Arizona State University, Department of English, Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302.

CAREER: Writer, novelist, and educator. Hotchkiss School Summer Program, Lakeville, CT, writer-in-residence, 1989–93; Murray State University, Murray, KY, assistant professor, 1989–92; Rockford College, Rockford, IL, visiting writer, 1993; Webster University, 1994–98, began as assistant professor, became associate professor; Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, visiting associate professor, 1999; Arizona State University, Tempe, associate professor, 1999–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Swarthout Award First Prize for Fiction, Arizona State University, 1987; Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, for Low Flying Aircraft; Michigan Literary Award, for Quick; O. Henry Award; Smart Family Foundation Award, Yale Review; Notable Book citation, New York Times, for Until Your Heart Stops; Best Book of the Year citation, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for Almost Home; Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the Novella; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; Howard Foundation fellowship, Brown University.

WRITINGS:

Low Flying Aircraft (stories), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1991.

Until Your Heart Stops (novel), Villard Books (New York, NY), 1993.

Almost Home (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 1998.

Quick (stories), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2004.

The Goat Bridge (novel), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2005.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals such as Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Yale Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist and short-story writer T.M. McNally is "a writer of psychological intensity and radiant images," commented Donna Seaman in Booklist. For McNally, "a story often moves in three parts: the locating of the issue; the confrontation with it; and the resolution," as the author himself commented in an interview for the Greenbelt Review online. "Once you know the cause or origin of a given circumstance, you have to lead your people out. At least I want to. And that I can do authorially—I can cause a collision of ideas, or things, to happen on the page. I can suggest a way to turn. So in this way the plot becomes more than a causally linked chain of events. It becomes as well the path to enlightenment. To recognition."

Low Flying Aircraft, McNally's first collection of short stories, offers a selection of tales revolving around disillusioned young men and women, many of them professionals who are searching for meaning in their lives. The characters in the stories are interconnected in many different ways: as relatives, lovers, and old friends. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Judith Paterson observed that the book is "a revolving door of linked narratives in which sorrow spins off sorrow and grief doubles back on grief in a complex design that becomes in the end a meditation on the meaning of loss." Neil Gordon, reviewing the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, stated that "McNally's is a deep understanding of the mind that lives with mourning, and he has mastered an original language to depict it."

In McNally's debut novel, Until Your Heart Stops, a high-school senior commits suicide, and his act sets off a chain of introspection and outward violence among his fellow students and his teachers. Four characters carry the narrative: Joe "Jazz" Jazinksi, a champion wrestler; Jazz's meek, blind girlfriend, Edith McCaw; swimming coach and history teacher Jenna Williams; and wrestling coach, driver-education teacher, and recovering alcoholic Ray Morrison. Unhappy with their current lives and burdened by their pasts, these characters ponder their present state and wonder if their future will be brightened by love or further darkened by loneliness. "Like an old testament god," wrote Matthew Stadler in the New York Times Book Review, "Mr. McNally uses the crucible of violence to refine his subjects, and to bring them to some wisdom." Richard Eder observed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that "McNally luminously portrays his adolescents trying to move from day to day on their surfaces and to survive their depths." Boston Globe contributor Kathryn Harrison also praised the book: "When McNally writes about youth, he lifts familiar struggles to a level of elegy."

High-school seniors Patrick McConnell and Elizabeth Pinski, the protagonists of Almost Home, save each other for the future in this story of first love set in 1970s Paradise Valley, Arizona. Patrick struggles to rebuild his life after his father's suicide; Elizabeth, once burned in a childhood accident, watches her parents' seemingly ideal marriage disintegrate. Patrick and Elizabeth's tenuous world, already shaken, often seems ready to collapse again with little notice, but it is also a world marked by loyalty and compassion. A Publishers Weekly writer concluded that "the novel succeeds memorably in playing out an interesting battle between the powers of love and despair." New York Times Book Review reviewer Edie Jarolim observed that "McNally doesn't believe in easy solutions to complicated problems, and his plotting is consistently sharp." McNally "celebrates our ability to learn from what doesn't kill us," Seaman wrote in Booklist. Writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Susan C. Thomson commented that McNally "drops a scrim of nostalgia over his story … to induce flashbacks of your own adolescence, vivid enough to keep you from wanting to go there again—ever."

McNally's second collection of stories, Quick, was published in 2004. Predominantly set in the American Southwest, the stories investigate the aftermath caused by the varied tragedies of ordinary lives. From an adolescent boy who watches his father deteriorate after his mother's death to a professor who contemplates the death of her brother and her affair with a student and a middle-aged man whose activist wife is having an affair with a local politician, death and sex are intertwined in an exploration of loss and of need. However, a subtle note of hope also surfaces in Quick. Indeed, New York Times Book Review contributor Maggie Galehouse noted that, "while McNally articulates despair with deadly accuracy, he occasionally musters some dryly humorous postmodern optimism." Booklist reviewer Seaman commented that the stories "balance grimness with humor [and] absurdity with concisely phrased yet deeply resonant truths."

Stephen Brings is a haunted photographer in McNally's The Goat Bridge, and he is still trying to make sense of his son's mysterious disappearance in Rome. To cope, Brings focuses his energies on the war in Sarajevo, refusing to document traditional wartime scenes but instead capturing images of hope, kindness, and life-affirming resilience. Often bewildered and stunned by the recurring nature of war in the twentieth century, Brings acts tentatively on his attraction to the German journalist Elise Kohlhaus. As he drifts through Sarajevo, he finds acceptance from a diverse group of locals, journalists, and diplomats in the war-ravaged segment of southeastern Europe known as the Balkans. Slowly, his interactions with these characters begin to chip away at his emotional shell. Seaman, writing again in Booklist, called the book McNally's "most far-reaching and scorchingly beautiful novel." While comparing the novel to the work of authors Milan Kundera and Graham Greene, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that "McNally's tale of redemption … has a sinewy elegance entirely its own." In addition, Chicago Tribune contributor Bill Savage commented that "the intricately layered narrative, moving back and forth in time and space, builds to a conclusion both bloody and subtle, a catharsis equal to the personal ordeal of Stephen and the historic tragedy of Sarajevo."

McNally told CA: "All the vocations I considered—music, the priesthood (I was raised Anglican), writing: they all have in common I think the wish to contribute. A sort of expression of gratitude for being here however briefly. Other occupations do that, too, but these were the areas in which I felt some calling. The best stories, the ones that pump the blood in my heart, always remind me how grateful I am to be alive. So writing, like reading, while solitary in nature, is a way for me to participate in the makings of this world while sharing in that larger connectedness with others—like teaching, which I always do.

"Love and its transcendent power is, I think, a frequent theme in my books—in my earlier work I've explored these subjects closer to my backyard. So the canvas of The Goat Bridge is larger, perhaps, but it's also a natural destination given the paths I've been on.

"My books are like kids: I make them, and they make me. They're all different; even when the subjects seem akin, the language, or attack (and I use the word musically) is not. The technique. Each book writes its own language. So my favorite I think is always the one I'm close to, but not quite, finishing up right now.

"I want to spread the word: compassion. I want to do my part as best I can. I want to make the world a better place for my having been here, however slight the shiver."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 82, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 1, 1991, Donna Seaman, review of Low Flying Aircraft, p. 494; November 15, 1992, Donna Seaman, review of Until Your Heart Stops, p. 580; June 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Almost Home, p. 1726; October 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Quick, p. 311; August, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of The Goat Bridge, p. 1994.

Boston Globe, February 7, 1993, Kathryn Harrison, review of Until Your Heart Stops.

Chicago Tribune, December 11, 2005, Bill Savage, review of The Goat Bridge.

Fryburger: Freiburg's English Language Magazine, January-February, 1995, Margit Schätzle, "Interview with T.M. McNally."

Library Journal, May 15, 1998, Charlotte L. Glover, review of Almost Home, p. 115.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 31, 1993, Richard Eder, review of Until Your Heart Stops.

New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, Judith Paterson, review of Low Flying Aircraft; February 14, 1993, Matthew Stadler, review of Until Your Heart Stops; August 23, 1998, Edie Jarolim, review of Almost Home; February 20, 2005, Maggie Galehouse, review of Quick, p. 20.

Playback, September, 2005, Laura Hamlett, "Angels Unaware and All Around" (interview).

Publishers Weekly, September 6, 1991, review of Low Flying Aircraft, p. 94; October 5, 1992, review of Until Your Heart Stops, p. 50; April 27, 1998, review of Almost Home, p. 43; July 25, 2005, review of The Goat Bridge, p. 45.

San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1992, Neil Gordon, review of Low Flying Aircraft.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 1998, Susan C. Thomson, review of Almost Home.