Still, a subtle and sometimes compelling vision of Los Angeleno life.
From the latest Flannery O’Connor Award winner, a debut collection of nine stories mainly about being young and black in southern California.
All are told in the first person, usually by young middle-class black women who find themselves in intimate relationships with non-blacks. In the opener, “Melvin in the Sixth Grade,” 11-year-old Avery moves from inner-city L.A. to the suburbs, where she develops a crush on class maverick Melvin Bukeford, himself a recent transplant from Oklahoma, “sporting a crew cut in 1981 when everyone else had long scraggly hair like the guys in Judas Priest or Journey.” As the only black girl in the class, Avery forges a bond with her Oklahoman fellow outsider, only to have this bond tested when the crowd turns against Melvin. Avery returns in the final story, “Markers,” where she’s back in L.A., in her late 20s, married to a wealthy Italian chef and making periodic visits to the suburbs to help her lonely middle-aged mother. In this, perhaps the strongest entry, Avery is stranded in a no-man’s-land between two worlds: her mother’s, which she can never return to, and her husband’s, to which she can never really hope to belong. This kind of deracination is shared by many here: the former stripper from “Break Any Woman Down,” whose relationship with a Greek porno actor is ruined by her well-intended affection for his friend; the photo-lab clerk in “Clay’s Thinking,” who gets in over his head with a wealthy executive woman; and the middle-aged woman from “Bars,” who has an unfortunate encounter with a man she met in a chat room. Johnson’s narrators are sympathetic and engaging, but the tales rely so heavily on vocal performances, with correspondingly less emphasis on plot or emotional movement, that they sometimes seem more like voice-riffs than full stories.
Still, a subtle and sometimes compelling vision of Los Angeleno life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8203-2315-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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