Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we...
Over half the protagonists of Best American Short Stories 2000 are anything but white middle class: the American short story, this collection suggests, has gone global.
We have, for instance, Chinese-American Ha Jin’s “The Bridegroom,” about the wedding of an unattractive woman to a closeted homosexual in a Manchurian city; Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Josef Pronek,” the story of a journalist from Sarajevo who haphazardly immigrates to Chicago and works his way into America while watching his country being torn apart on CNN; and Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s “Nilda,” which reprises his narrator, Yunior, while closing the book on Yunior’s cancer-stricken older brother Rafa. Also on hand is Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” (from her Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies), about the relationship between an elderly landlady and her tenant, an Indian newly arrived in turbulent Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969. In Walter Mosley’s “The Fly,” an African-American mailroom worker mistakes a white secretary’s revulsion for him as racial prejudice, while she interprets his innocent crush as sexual harassment. In Marilyn Krysl’s “The Thing Around Them,” a Sri Lankan fears for her son’s life after a friend’s son is dragged to death behind a jeep. The horrors, the absurdities, the perils, and the possibilities of the millennial globe—all are well represented. Several pieces also feature white middle-class protagonists. Michael Byers’s “The Beautiful Days” is a coming-of-ager about a student wrestling with roommates and Herodotus. “Call If You Need Me,” a recently discovered Raymond Carver story, echoes the themes and tones of Carver’s later work.
Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we are as a nation. . . .” Guest editor Doctorow identifies a formal freedom in today’s short story: a “literary shackle has been broken.” Both claims are borne out, more or less.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-92687-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
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
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