by Adam Haslett ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2002
Not by any means the book it might—perhaps should—have been. But don’t overlook those three terrific stories.
There are some spectacular moments, and also several inexplicable miscalculations in this extremely uneven yet unquestionably promising debut collection of nine stories by Yale Law student Haslett.
Most of Haslett’s characters are silent sufferers or unrequited lovers who live out lives of silent desperation unrelieved by full connection with others or disclosure of their innermost secrets. This is particularly true of stories that focus on gay characters, such as an orphaned high school boy powerfully attracted to a surly, violence-prone classmate (“The Beginnings of Grief”); an unmarried brother and sister who have loved and lost the same man (“Devotion”); and a terminal AIDS patient whose carefully planned withdrawal from job and relationships ends in (harrowingly described) surreal dementia (“Reunion”). These are edgy, disturbing explorations of loneliness that don’t quite work—as are “My Father’s Business,” a mock-documentary look at a bipolar patient with a curious philosophical bent; and “The Volunteer,” an initially gripping account of the relationship between a lonely elderly woman and the effectively motherless teenager who bonds with her that falls apart into inexcusable contrivance. And yet Haslett’s riskiest, most far-reaching pieces are his best. “Divination,” about a private school student who has inherited his father’s unwanted prophetic “gift,” grates expertly on the reader’s nerves. Even better are “The Good Doctor,” in which a callow physician’s efforts “to organize his involuntary proximity to human pain” are unsettled by the story of a luckless family’s destruction by economic failure and drug addiction; and “The Storyteller,” a hypnotically strange amalgam of Chekhov and Beckett, about an American in Scotland torn between suicidal guilt over his lingering depression and its erosion of his marriage, and his compulsive intimacy with a stoical old woman and a dying boy: it’s one of the finest, and most unusual, stories of recent years.
Not by any means the book it might—perhaps should—have been. But don’t overlook those three terrific stories.Pub Date: July 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50167-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
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
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by Flannery O'Connor edited by Benjamin B. Alexander
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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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