A comic novel proves an agreeable change of pace for the ordinarily serious-minded Smiley (A Thousand Acres, 1991, etc.). At an unnamed Midwestern state university familiarly known as Moo U., the academic year 1989-90 is not going well. Budget cuts have been imposed by the state's yahoo governor; the faculty will have to clean their own offices, and food services will be taken over by McDonald's, which has no use for the unionized kitchen staff. Hostilities simmer between Dr. Lionel Gift, self-satisfied apostle of free-market economics, and "Chairman X," an unreconstructed '60s radical who heads the horticulture department. Other staff members jostling for position include Ivar Harstad, the university's ineffectual provost; Loraine Walker, his secretary, who really runs the place (and isn't above quietly shuffling money in and out of departments, depending on who gains her favor); associate English professor Timothy Monahan, whose social climbing in New York publishing is one of the book's funniest sequences; and earthy Helen Levy, professor of foreign languages, who likes to make life uncomfortable for her pompous male colleagues. A few students are sketched with equal incisiveness, though readers are unlikely to get emotionally involved with any of the characters. The fun comes from watching Smiley expertly juggle a huge cast in a convoluted plot that somehow manages to connect Gift's involvement with a sinister corporation that wants to mine gold from a virgin rain forest to a crazy local farmer's invention of a revolutionary new agricultural technique. The satire — of academic careerism, politics both left and right (though the conservatives get the worst lashing), and human foolishness of all sorts — stings but is never heavy-handed. As always in Smiley's fiction, expert storytelling propels the narrative forward, compensating here for a slightly chilly tone. Not as intellectually or morally challenging as the Pulitzer Prize-winner can be at her best, but Smiley coasting is still more stimulating than most writers trying their hardest.
Pub Date: April 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42023-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a word: magnificent.
Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.
Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”
In a word: magnificent.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4281-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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