Found this PDF on the web, linked to the Illinois Institute of Technology. Whaaa? I am so confused.
The best I can tell, this document may be a review of some sort by the teacher of Lit 309 (her syllabus is also online). It seems to refer to a book of short stories by Daniel Lyons titled The Last Good Man. According to Amazon.com, the book is described thusly by Library Journal
Like Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio , Lyons’s debut collection of 11 stories–winner of the Associated Writing Programs 1992 Award in Short Fiction–lifts the rock off a seemingly sleepy town to cast light on the quietly desperate secret lives of its inhabitants. Lawton Falls, Massachusetts is a dying mill city whose ethnically mixed population includes politicians, priests, blue-collar workers, mixed-up teens, and the newspaperman of the title tale who, at the end of an undistinguished career, wrestles with the morality of making “a great deal of money in an illicit fashion.” Lyons, a remarkably gifted writer, renders these slices of life with compassion and a keen eye for telling detail. Highly recommended.
– David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. District Lib., Canton, Ohio
While the review for the book on Amazon does not mention the Borden case, I guess I am to assume from this piece on Sharon Quiroz’s site that the story “The Miracle” does. If so, then this is news to me. I guess I am going to have to check this one out of my local library and figure it all out.
Here is the entire text from the PDF:
Lyon City
Lawton Falls is the town in which Lizzie Borden famously axed her father to death. Mr. Borden was the rich owner of the mill in Lawton Falls at that time, a city where workers certainly earned their pay, but for all the hard work, the place was rather prosperous. According to the back cover of the book, Lawton Falls is now a dying mill city, perhaps best described in the opening paragraph of “The Miracle,†where a once viable, if ugly, church, is described as abandoned.Perhaps the axe murders were a portent of spiritual crises to come.
If the city of Lawton Falls is characterized by spiritual decay, it is equally characterized by ethnic identity and conflict. Over the entire collection of stories, we see the city as a set of ethnic groups, almost all Catholic, which word means, you may know “universal.†(There is one Jewish character, which still means the question is about religion, not, for example, eye-color.) So the city as Lyons describes it here appears to be held together by a common religion, even though that basis is sometimes barely a memory or even not at all present to the consciousness of the characters. These Catholics are subdivided into Italians, Puerto Ricans and Cubans (why no Irish?). Thus, national/linguistic identities sometimes seem to hide a religious commonality. We will see in all the stories different kinds of spiritual crisis, often religious, frequently of different origin. But Lyons always seems to be fretting about spiritual failures: the city is multi-ethnic, spiritually troubled, and it isn’t clear that religion is the answer.
Download your PDF copy here, if you really want to.
