Whose America is it? The subject of Dustin M. Hoffman’s collection Such a Good Man is, by sheer percentage, masculinity in Middle America. Represented here are good fathers, bad fathers, and in-between fathers. There are husbands who are trying hard and husbands who aren’t trying very much at all. There are laborers, house painters, framers, plumbers, hustlers, and the odd carnie. In some superficial ways these stories belong to a tradition I thought I was happy to say goodbye to, a tradition of realistic stories about white men and their struggles and concerns. But Hoffman knows his material, and his eye is as pitiless as it is empathetic. Hoffman wants to analyze the weaknesses and the strengths that make up the American male laborer’s psyche with the aim understanding what is mythos and what is everyday reality.
There are women in these stories too, of course, and Hoffman’s as insightful when writing about them as he is when writing about men. The title story is a perfect example of this, as the female protagonist navigates mazes both emotional and literal in the hopes of mitigating the damage that men are capable of. In “The First Woman,” told in the language of a Tall Tale, the object is hyper-capable, semi-legendary roofer Winona, but the subject is her male coworkers’ reactions to and dependence on her.
Among the varied techniques Hoffman uses to tell a story, one that might not be immediately apparent is the frequent choice to use the collective protagonist We. Over a third of the stories feature a We as a main character. Whose America is it? It’s all of ours: the NPR-listening house framers and the apocalyptic garbage men, the vaguely crooked aerial photographers and the baffled fathers.
In “Essentials,” a crew of COVID-era supermarket employees collectively fret about the maskless, Don’t Tread on Me t-shirt clad shopper slowly combing the aisles, effectively evoking a pandemic unease we wished we’d forgotten, until a moment of connection that’s as believable as it is unexpected underlines the human thread that unites them all. “The Salesmen Approach” initially presents its collective protagonist, a posse of door-to-door salesmen, as little more than a zombie horde, a plague of locusts descending on your quiet cul-de-sac. As details accrue, Hoffman skillfully reveals the depth of understanding they have of our frustrations and our joys:
How lovely are your valances, your oaken mantelpiece, the vertical stripes on your daughter’s walls. It must have taken excruciating hours to get the lines so perfectly straight. When you pulled away the blue tape, how hard did your heart break when you saw the paint bleeding through? How hard did you smack your son when he smudged his palm into a teal stripe?
The Salesmen understand us because they are us. And we are them.
Though the cast of characters threatens to become interchangeable, Hoffman takes care to shuffle his approaches, venturing into near-future speculation, gentle surrealism, metaphysical comedy, and end-of-the-world scenario, as well as experimenting with form: “Orville Killen: Lifetime Stats” is told as a series of baseball card texts, while “Too Bad for Marcel Ronk,” one of the finest stories, initially seems little more than a series of pleasant digressions about its characters until it meanders its way back to its center, revealing that the story, instead of being about Marcel Ronk, is essentially about the characters’ collective hopes and desires.
Some of the stories work less well than others: “Mistint” takes a turn that doesn’t feel quite in keeping with its main character, and “Privy” strives a little too hard to come by its communion symbolism. But when the writing is so assured, results for individual readers will vary. Hoffman knows his way around a cherry picker and a plumber’s toolbox, but he also knows his way around a sentence and a metaphor, and even the lesser stories find fresh material to mine within the mundane. In “Dad Died in Denim,” he precisely describes the scent of the titular father as “shop grease and WD-40 and Brut deodorant and Stetson cologne,” while in “Such a Good Man,” he effectively conveys the attitude of one social class to another: “Eggy knew their type, fussy helicopter parents, the rich kind raised on fistfuls of pills and internet, who could afford to be chronically anxious about terrorism and plastic straws in the ocean and global starvation because they never had to worry about empty bellies.”
So whose America is it? At a time in history when it’s easy to despair of the undoing of all that is good at the hands of unchecked, unreflective male ego (an anxiety worked through by the protagonist of the opening story), this collection is a welcome reminder that the collective We, even the collective We that is predominantly white and male and working class, is still a group as notable for its diversity as for its sameness.
Such a Good Man, by Dustin M. Hoffman. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, March 2025. 232 pages. $18.95, paper.
Andrew Fort’s work has been published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Field Report, and Telephone. He also has an IMDB page, the single credit of which is “Zombie Historian.” His novel The Emerald Ballroom was a bestseller on the Powells.com small press list. He lives in Portland, where he hosts a live reading series called HOCUS.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 