Altogether a delight to savor.
The spirit of play is at work in this lively latest crop of Southern stories gamely chosen by fiction-writer Gurganus (The Practical Heart, 2001, etc.), whose own work has appeared in the series.
Skillful vernacular storytelling and writing with heart mark many of these selections, such as R.T. Smith’s “Tastes Like Chicken,” which imagines the entrancing, albeit lonely livelihood of a snake-catcher whose wife eventually leaves him for a larger (and less menacing) life. Nanci Kincaid’s “The Currency of Love” depicts beautifully a prickly relationship between a mother hospitalized for a breast biopsy and her divorced daughter, while Daniel Wallace’s “Justice” hilariously evokes the biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham in a story about a father’s decision to kill his son for taking the last tissue in the box. Two stories about dogs prove surprisingly moving: Wendell Berry’s “Mike” describes the transcendent convergence of a farmer, his land and his dog; and Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “You Love That Dog” tracks a troubled marriage through the husband’s decision to shoot his beloved dog because he keeps running away. Keith Lee Morris’s unusual “Tired Heart” is an elegiac sojourn from South Carolina to Puget Sound in the voice of a young married man hired to transport parcels for an anonymous, increasingly exacting employer. J.D. Chapman’s “Amanuensis” touchingly renders the inner life of a tubercular war vet in 1917 moved to a hospital in North Carolina, and Cary Holladay’s “The Burning” envisions the horrific fate of an 18th-century Virginia slave burned at the stake for the murder of her master. Gurganus maintains a buoyant mix of gravitas and levity, and in his tongue-in-cheek introduction, lists the kinds of stories with stock “Southerly” ingredients that he has spared the reader, i.e., those with arbitrary phonetic spelling, village interaction, impending gun violence, pan-generational sex, “plus a traffic-pile-up run-on-sentence construction lacking any Faulknerian suspension-bridge engineering.”
Altogether a delight to savor.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-531-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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