A striking talent ill at ease with the short-story form.
The lives of black Americans, shadowed by the surreal and shot through with violence, are the focus in these ten stories from poet and novelist Allen (Rails Under My Back, 2000).
Violence erupts in the third sentence of “Same,” when Glory Hope Lincoln severs her husband’s penis in revenge for his “wandering eye,” an act inspired by Jesus, “the only white man she liked.” The story is about her son Lincoln Roosevelt Lincoln, who has inherited his father’s sex drive and his mother’s determination in planning the seduction of a grieving widow; she and her husband had been fans of Lincoln’s hugely successful war-porn novels. The story shows Allen’s strengths and weaknesses: It’s compellingly readable yet wildly undisciplined, with a messy ending. Violence is also the backdrop to Lee Christmas’s life in “Shimmy.” Back in Mississippi, before Lee moved north and made his fortune, his mother, a devout Christian, murdered his abusive father before killing herself. Up north Lee encounters the paranormal, a ghost making love to his wife. Later, in another messy ending, the hitherto powerful Lee is bested by the psychic power of a seven-year-old midget. In the title story, the power belongs to the white cops who bust a black turnstile-jumper; there’s a too-long wait before the sight of a prisoner with wings marks a sharp turn to the surreal, while in the muddled “The Green Apocalypse” the power belongs to a demonic teenager. The other memorable stories are “Bread and the Land” (a child tries to figure out adult duplicity) and “The Near Remote” (police superintendent and unhelpful civilian witness in a power struggle). All these stories are spiced up by terrific dialogue: Allen would make a fine playwright. Only in “Mississippi Story” is the dialogue deliberately bland, to contrast with an unresolved racial fury pulsing beneath the surface.
A striking talent ill at ease with the short-story form.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55597-509-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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