Though more radical narrative strategies aren’t represented, the selection is of such consistently high quality that almost...
Among the 20 competitors in what novelist Patchett (Bel Canto, 2001, etc.) terms “the short story Olympics,” there are plenty of worthy contenders for the gold medal.
As usual, this annual anthology mixes stories from perennial favorites (including former guest editors Tobias Wolff and Ann Beattie, and the obligatory and always welcome Alice Munro) with selections from small-circulation literary journals, highlighting the range of possibility within the genre. Where a short-story collection by a single author tends to repeat patterns, rhythms and themes, there’s a much greater sense of serendipity and surprise here. Whether because of the luck of this year’s draw or the preferences of the guest editor, the narratives are typically more straightforward than experimental, frequently first person, strong on the storytelling verities of plot, character and dialogue. Many of them (including Donna Tartt’s “The Ambush,” Maxine Swann’s “Secret” and Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh”) concern adolescent initiation and rites of passage. Though all of the writers are North American, the settings extend from a Korean island resort (Paul Yoon’s “Once the Shore”) and dog racing in Beijing (Jack Livings’s “The Dog”) to the Bosnian poetry community (Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Conductor”) and an American’s return to his family’s native Latvia (“A New Gravestone for an Old Grave”). Many of the stories tend toward the short side, but the last and longest is the most wickedly funny, as Beattie lampoons the bi-coastal memorial services of an esteemed painter turned alcoholic, pornographic comics illustrator. The shortest and strangest is Robert Coover’s “Grandmother’s Nose,” in which a young girl (in another rite of passage) comes to terms with death in a fairy-tale subversion of “Little Red Riding Hood.” In one of the most inventive, Katherine Bell’s “The Casual Car Pool” finds a sky-diving parachutist caught on a bridge, disrupting rush hour and complicating the lives of three strangers sharing a ride to qualify for the car-pool lane.
Though more radical narrative strategies aren’t represented, the selection is of such consistently high quality that almost any of these stories could be some reader’s favorite.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-54351-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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