Uneven in execution, but permeated with a mature understanding that our lives are an accumulation of moments—and we live...
In her third story volume, McCorkle (Final Vinyl Days, 1998, etc.) again demonstrates that there’s room to grow in New Southern fiction as she explores various stages of human existence with emphasis on our kinship with animals.
It’s the narrative voice that distinguishes this North Carolina–born author from her less accomplished regional peers. McCorkle’s prose is contemporary without annoying K-Mart modernism, cognizant of her characters’ quirks without making them gothic freaks. Only the ubiquitous animal metaphors are occasionally strained, though they work brilliantly in the best pieces. “Billy Goats” ponders human vulnerability and male cruelty as the adult narrator recalls biking at dusk with other friends “too old for kick the can and too young to make out,” vowing never to be like the disappointed, depressed adults in their small hometown. (Scattered references pinpoint McCorkle’s habitual setting of Fulton, North Carolina.) “Hominids” is a scathing monologue by a 40ish wife sick to death of the dirty jokes and obsession with breasts of the men gathered for her husband’s annual golf weekend—readers can easily imagine the guys beating their chests and posturing for fellow gorillas. Not that the female characters are perfect: “If I were a dog I would have been put down by now,” boasts the angry, self-isolated narrator of “Dogs,” and the dead mother in “Toads” is revealed to have stifled two husbands with her insistence on being a depressed victim. Some of the best stories in the collection, which follows the arc of a lifespan, concern the elderly. Strongest of all is “Turtles,” a searing portrait of life in a nursing home and the slow, agonizing loss of mental and physical faculties. Though McCorkle deals uncompromisingly with often grim material, there’s still plenty of tough-minded humor and an elegiac tenderness for happiness past, struggles long ago won or lost, our perennial yearning for love.
Uneven in execution, but permeated with a mature understanding that our lives are an accumulation of moments—and we live most fully when we slow down to savor or recollect them.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-256-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
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
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