It’s gratifying to put yourself in the hands of a veteran storyteller who knows what he’s doing—and is quietly secure in...
A modern master’s latest array of glittering tales offers the pleasures and solace of storytelling.
This is Johnson’s (The Way of the Writer, 2016, etc.) fourth collection, and as before, his stories can be as morally instructive as fables, as fancifully ingenious as Twilight Zone scripts, and as elegantly inscrutable as Zen riddles. In stories such as “The Weave,” in which a stylist seeks revenge by stealing valuable hair extensions from her former employer, and “Occupying Arthur Whitfield," in which a cab driver intends to commit larceny upon a seemingly truculent passenger, Johnson imparts wisdom with cunningly selective detail in both character and milieu; he can evoke the lingering residue of chemicals in the vacant beauty shop with just a few lines. Johnson is in immaculate control of the stories’ myriad settings, as in the ancient Greece of “The Cynic,” where Plato is dislodged from his smug certainties by Diogenes’ bug-eyed eccentricities. Johnson’s philosophical and spiritual erudition, most prominently displayed in such novels as Oxherding Tale (1982) and Dreamer (1998), also insinuates itself in to “Prince of the Ascetics,” in which a Buddhist monk discovers a “middle way,” and “Idols of the Cave,” in which a Muslim-American soldier’s conflict with a bigoted white officer while stationed in Afghanistan climaxes in the ruins of an ancient library. Johnson's whimsical side comes through in “Guinea Pig,” which extracts deeper tones and craftier implications from the hoary old science-fiction subgenre of “personality transfer.” The title story is in many ways the book’s most distinctive: It takes the form of a late-night conversation between the author and his late friend and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson in the coffee shops and bars of Johnson’s Seattle hometown. Even here, there’s an unexpected twist, but, as with the other tales, what’s even more unexpected is how this startling development emerges with such unassuming control.
It’s gratifying to put yourself in the hands of a veteran storyteller who knows what he’s doing—and is quietly secure in what he’s teaching.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8438-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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BOOK REVIEW
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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