A promising collection that offers a necessary glimpse into lives often left unexamined.
In this debut collection, Scott’s characters confront the violence and unpredictability cutting through the grind of small-town life.
Scott’s stories examine the interior lives of middle- and working-class women in the deteriorating Rust Belt of Pennsylvania, from fast-food workers to set-upon waitresses, but she's also interested in unpacking the ways that stories are told. In “Narrative Time,” characters jostle for prominence in the space of a single footnoted sentence. In the title story, a young woman tells a man about the breakup of a previous relationship, carefully structuring the tale around the haphazard placement—and misplacement—of a cleaver in a moving van. The best stories in the collection find room among Scott’s gritty realism for more movement and play in the unexpected. Take the greasy love affair between two young women who work at a fried fish joint in “Myths of the Body.” Newly minted manager Ana sees her predictable relationship with a male boss “stretching before her like a paved and endless, frightening, path,” filled with “a house in Scranton with a side yard” and “fat, insecure children.” But when she falls for the “moody,” “bristling” Donny, whose “collar-bone craned as if reaching for something,” Ana finds something different to whet her appetite. In the equally strong “Monsieur,” a young woman recalls her relationship with a strange high school French teacher. “I spent years at attention, waiting for a glimpse of a dirty hat, a red turtleneck, the receding flap of a trench coat,” she thinks, upon learning her abuser has died. Beneath all of Scott’s strange and moving stories lie the promise or threat of violence and despair, which is, perhaps, the most real thing about them.
A promising collection that offers a necessary glimpse into lives often left unexamined.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946724-02-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Acre
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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
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