Nine varied, lively, and beguiling stories from the ever-improving author of, most recently, Carolina Moon (1996). If you still think southern fiction is all about decaying antebellum mansions, miscegenation, and disturbing family secrets, you owe it to yourself to read McCorkle. Not that she shuns such matters—it’s just that her amiably unstrung characters keep reminding us that, even while psyches and marriages are collapsing, dishes pile up in the sink, and sometimes dirty laundry is, well, just clothes that have to be washed and hung on the line. She’s wonderful with beleaguered or comically resourceful women: a pregnant one trying to quit smoking and shape up generally (“Life Prerecorded”); an entrepreneur who markets funerals for “the soon-to-be deceased” (“It’s a Funeral! RSVP”); and, most memorably, a single mother obsessed with her own and her young son’s vulnerability (“A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World”). If McCorkle stumbles with a monologue addressed by a man’s mistress to his wife (“Your Husband Is Cheating On Us”), suggesting the two murder him together, she shines when widening her lens to examine (“Paradise”) the seriocomic chemistry between a New York Jew (Adam) and an Atlanta fashion designer (Eve) hung up on “the North-South thing,” or a young clergyman’s uncertain ministry (“The Anatomy of Man”). She has a deadly eye for endearingly ludicrous detail (weddings and funerals bring out her best), a genius for piquant first-person narration, and a finely tuned ear for the accents of exasperated domesticity (“If Jesus were here he would take that child outside and wear his butt out”). Her stories meander even when they’re comparatively tightly plotted—but it’s always a pleasure staying with them just to hear her people rattle on. The work of an accomplished comic writer who’s continually refining her skills and expanding her range. McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty.
Pub Date: June 2, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-204-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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