A substantial debut by a promising and confident new writer.
A story collection exploring issues of anger and loss.
The 14 stories gathered in Felver’s debut take place in rural settings throughout the Midwest, with a few exceptions set in urban locales. Though uniformly well-crafted, these are gritty stories that often touch on brutal subject matter. In their depiction of men dealing with hardship and loss, it’s the raw, sometimes-violent emotions of anger and regret that the author closely examines, and yet there are also genuine moments of poignancy. In “Queen Elizabeth,” one of the standout stories, an unlikely couple’s loving and passionate marriage is increasingly threatened by their class and educational differences until their bond unravels following the death of their young daughter. In “Hide-and-Seek,” the narrator is a middle-aged man who likes to hang out at airport lounges fantasizing about weekend trips with imaginary girlfriends. When he suddenly meets up with his long-estranged brother, they begin to reminisce about their past and a brother who died in an accident in their youth. The narrator slowly gathers that his differences with his brother are less defined than he had imagined, and memories of their brother’s death are equally painful for them both. “It’s sad, but my brother and me can only really talk about three or four different things, and one of them is our dead brother. It’s sad how I can’t punch him either, or maybe how I don’t really want to anymore. I guess I’ve always wanted to know someone else was still miserable about all of it, but now that it’s happening, it’s a nasty business.” Felver’s writing is sharp and insightful. His stories evoke the style and themes of writers ranging from Richard Russo to Rick Bass to Andre Dubus III and, in the particularly brutal surrealist title story, “The Dogs of Detroit,” Cormac McCarthy.
A substantial debut by a promising and confident new writer.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8229-4542-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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