A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.
Three novellas and two short stories quietly dramatize the outward manifestations of inner, emotional struggles.
In the short story “Giselle’s Tears,” the finest in Eron’s brief collection of fiction, Bart, the narrator, is a high school wrestler. He is largely neglected by his two sisters: Rachel, the popular one blessed with both brains and beauty, and Giselle, not similarly endowed by genetic fortune but always ready to grab the spotlight with her penchant for emotional fireworks. While Bart is lost in the shuffle, he forges his own drama when a pretty cheerleader touches his face: “But if some men date their sexual practice from the first girl they kissed, I date mine from the evening Marian Leigh Anberg touched my face.” In a casually informal, confidential style, the author sensitively captures the significance of that transformative moment for Bart, one that would follow him years later. In the novella The Chimera in the Plaster, Kal Norbert, an unspectacular college dropout and the “butt of the cosmic joke,” begins an improbable sexual affair with Calla Dakos, a promiscuous woman who is both receptive and indifferent to his advances. Kal is compelled to reflect on what might be either her secret power or weakness and reevaluate what he considers the “Kal Norbert Type.” All of the offerings are delicately thoughtful, though they can meander too long without focus. In addition, the author seems to incline in the direction of a kind of moral didacticism—the novella Misguided Missiles, the most comic of the pieces, chronicles the attempt by emotionally beleaguered private detective Bart Coldecker to find some meaning in his life by becoming a professional wrestler. While the tale is a genuinely funny one and impressively inventive, it concludes with a lucidity that seems more facile than edifying. Eron’s assemblage of fiction is brimming with promise, but here that promise is only inconsistently realized.
A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-958015-01-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Contingency Street Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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