Reviewed by Matthew Hannah

In a now-famous and probably apocryphal literary exchange, Ernest Hemingway once bet he could write a short story using any number of words. Given the number "six," he proceeded to write on a napkin one of the first examples of what we now might call "flash fiction": "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The power of this short piece is located in what is left imagined or unsaid, in what is glimpsed beyond the words themselves. Flash fiction, at its best, works like a firecracker: a fizzling of incomprehension at the simplicity of the language followed by the explosion of understanding. Its power is located in the split second between reading the sentence and recognizing the climax. We feel a sense of tragic shock when we realize why the baby shoes were never worn, why they're for sale.

The best pieces in Dustin M. Hoffman's new collection of flash fiction, No Good for Digging, provide that gut punch of dawning recognition. From the opening story (and my personal favorite), "A Nesting," which greets the reader with a no-holds-barred, remarkably simple, yet incredibly solemn meditation on life and death, to the title story, which combines his gift for understated tragedy with an abiding concern for working folks, Hoffman unearths powerful veins of emotional truth buried beneath the soil of his prose. It's incredibly difficult to move someone emotionally in one or two paragraphs, yet I found myself gasping with revelation or pausing to digest many of Hoffman's pieces in this volume. 

Like One-Hundred-Knuckled-Fist, his first book, No Good for Digging often features Hoffman's working-class roots as an inspiration for meditations on life and loss, regret, pain, and hope. In a similar vein to Donald Ray Pollock, Harry Crews, or Charles Bukowski, Hoffman plumbs America's buried literary unconscious for inspiration in the everyday working people who paint walls, build houses, landscape manicured lawns, serve drinks, wait tables, and dig trenches. Unlike Pollock and Bukowski, however, whose depictions of poor America can be unforgiving, Hoffman searches for empathy in his representations. His characters are often rough and unpleasant, but they are also filled with pathos. They are redeemed by small moments, minor details that are suddenly brought into focus by the flash-fiction medium: a carving of a trout fishermen with his grandson on the side of a coffin to memorialize a crotchety trickster; the P-66 Vanguard fighter plane drawing which masks larger emotional conflicts inside a disturbed boy; the purple paint of a released inmate's first interior decoration after being freed from prison. Such moments reflect Hoffman's deep empathy for his broken and struggling characters. 

The stories in No Good for Digging are divided into two camps. Many of the stories focus on vignettes of working-class folks, the victims of a brutally capitalist economic system which leaves no quarter for the impoverished. These are my favorite stories in the collection, and I especially recommend "A Nesting," "An All-Night Diner," "A Realistic Airplane," "The Plumber who Found Treasure," "Father at Shift End," "Brandy's Streetlamp," "No Good for Digging," and "Bruise Room." These are exemplary of Hoffman's best work, powerfully short meditations on what it means to work and struggle and survive in America. Other pieces in the collection are more like prose poems: strange, surreally evocative bits of life and beauty. "My Pupils, Dive Sites," "On the Strongest Man Compound," "Hair Cropper Shies," "The Diviner," and "When We" represent this group. When combined, these two strands produce a remarkable effect on the reader: a sense that the mundane, workaday capitalist world may grind us down, but that there are still transcendent moments of beauty to be found, moments which salve our hurting souls, like the purple paint in "Bruise Room." "Purple doesn't care what you did. Purple only wants to blanket you in a big, warm bruise." When the pain of his blue-collar realism becomes too deep, Hoffman provides his readers a release, a fantastical and bracing jump in the ocean, which refreshes us and prepares us for more. 

No Good for Digging is a collection for our times. It is a reminder that humanity is everywhere, struggling and suffering and beautiful. At a time when it can be easy to stereotype and judge, Hoffman reminds us there are deeper truths to excavate. Hoffman doesn't preach, he doesn't lecture or harangue. He just writes simply and powerfully about the tiny flashes that make us human. Imperfect, yes, but still beautifully human. Like the plumber in the title story, such truths can be impossible to grasp, but they are still worth the dig.