By Dylan Loring
The 21 short stories in Dustin M. Hoffman’s Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) captivate from the get-go. With first sentences like “Dad’s drunk and riding the bucket,” “They told Eggy they’d be calling the cops soon, if their missing kid didn’t appear in the next ten minutes,” “The man with the yellow hat dragged his monkey out onto the balcony and locked it inside the wire-walled kennel,” and “He was hurling children into the pool,” these stories craft a momentum that never dissipates. Throughout the book, Hoffman’s working-class characters react to past, present, and potential losses—of parents, of lovers, of children, of jobs, of country, of games of Monopoly with God—and to stagnation, a fate that at least isn’t loss. If these themes sound meat-and-potatoes, all the better; Hoffman brings freshness, nuance, and flavor to these staples of human conflict.
“Privy” starts out with Bill, the cheapest plumber in Saginaw, Michigan, working on fixing a toilet in a church restroom. A woman walks into the restroom, and Bill doesn’t immediately announce his presence, and feels too awkward to do so a few seconds later when she starts urinating. As a result, Bill tries to hide and overhears the woman on the phone yelling at her ex-husband, who seeks joint custody over their child. He, of course, gets discovered by the woman before she leaves the restroom. In addition to accusing Bill of being a perv and stealing his most expensive plumbing tool, she tells Bill, “Bet you think I’m a bitch after spying on my phone call. Men love spotting a bitch, right?” This couldn’t be further from the truth for Bill, whose wife recovered from cancer and then left him, and whose son August has also recently left to join her. He relates to the messiness of the situation on a personal level.
The woman proceeds to hold his tool hostage unless Bill can steal some communion from the church for her. “‘My husband, my ex, was Catholic. I wasn’t,’ she said. ‘When it was time for communion, he kneeled up there by the priest all lonesome and haughty, and I just had to watch. Like a heathen. Like I was less than.'” As zany as the story’s plot is, it is quite beautiful in execution. Bill envies the woman at the conclusion of the story: “Her children—however old they were, whatever their names, however many their number—they were slipping like August. But she refused to let them slip. This woman battled to preserve. At least Bill had witnessed her say words he’d never dare speak to his wife the survivor. What he couldn’t ever say.” The reader ends the story wondering if Bill has admitted that he can’t take action like the woman or if he has instead become inspired by her to act.
Hoffman takes so many wonderful risks that pay off throughout the collection. “Orville Killen: Lifetime Stats” tells the story of a professional baseball player in the form of a series of baseball cards that chronicles Killen’s on-field and off-field performances. It’s a delightfully conceived structure that helps reinforce the content of the story, somehow avoiding any semblance of gimmick. In “Dad Died in Denim,” the darkly comedic situation of trying to figure out how to deal with burying a man who doesn’t own a suit becomes an emotionally resonant tale that leaves the reader rooting for a Canadian tuxedo-clad corpse. There are so many potential pitfalls for a COVID-19 story, but “Essentials” does its subject matter justice, chronicling the anxieties and observations of grocery store workers through the first-person plural point of view.
The workplace, interactions at work, and work itself are central to this collection. Hoffman excels at depicting camaraderie, intimacy, violence, and dysfunction within groups. The emotions and actions of the coworkers in these stories feel so real. In “The Whites,” a crew of housepainters (the “We” of the story) tracks their coworker Simon’s first day. Simon grows frustrated from accidentally leaning against a freshly painted brown wall and his frustrations build to the point of announcing that he is quitting, causing the crew to note:
But we didn’t do shit to Simon. He couldn’t stand not being the Michael Jordan of painting. Us, we failed out of welding school and got laid off from GM and couldn’t handle zapping pigs and slitting throats all day and started a taxi business and then ran over an old lady named Irena’s big toe. Painters must know how to absorb failure. That’s why we wear all white, the most common color.
It turns out that Simon needs the job because of a past major failure of his own (stabbing someone who said he’d never amount to anything) and quickly rescinds his resignation. Simon’s admission about his past creates an intimacy between himself and the rest of the paint crew. At the end of the day, the crew cracks open beers and paints over the brown stain on Simon’s overalls with a fresh bucket of white, an act that feels like an initiation ritual. Hoffman highlights the painters’ vulnerability in the story’s final sentence: “Even under a few coats of paint, even with the brown erased, we couldn’t quit imagining a blossom of red blooming through Simon’s whites, through Ray’s and Manny’s whites, through us all.” It is as though the entire painting crew is taking on the pain of Simon’s stab victim, as though they feel similarly haunted by their own pasts. However, they have arguably what they need the most: each other and a paycheck.
Dustin M. Hoffman’s stellar collection Such a Good Man is populated with these kind of stories—where characters discover what is essential for their survival. The book, then, reveals the resilience of the human capacity for hope.
Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire—Barron County. His poems have appeared in jubilat, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, and Forklift, Ohio. His first full-length collection This Smile is Starting to Hurt (Black Lawrence Press) came out in 2024.
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