After years of litigation between the publisher and Cheever's estate, this collection of 13 stories now in the public domain proves something of a disappointment. While Cheever fans will be grateful for a sampling of his juvenilia, others should be warned that these pieces are hardly typical of his best work. Most first appeared in the 30's and bear the marks of their time as well as the influence of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Depression fiction. The earliest stories, from small avant-garde magazines, stress atmosphere over character; they're bleak, abstract expressions of social jitters during an anxious era of poverty and decline. When Cheever begins to find a voice, his fictions become more convincing. A pre-Miller, post-Dreiser traveling shoe-salesman ("The Autobiography of a Drummer") laments his once thriving business. "In Passing" records Cheever's dissatisfaction with left-wing ideology as his young protagonist drifts through lean times. A number of stories deal with working women at turning points: a waitress who suddenly realizes how empty her routine is ("Bayonne"); a hard-working dancer, hired to lend legitimacy to a strip show, who loses herself in her stage persona ("The Princess"); a 52-year-old stripper who, with great dignity, shows she hasn't lost it ("The Teaser"); and a young nanny who reveals a surprisingly refined aesthetic sense ("The Opportunity"). Equally clever and in the same commercial vein are three stories from Collier's, all set on the fringes of high society in the world of horse-racing. With an O. Henryish twist, "His Young Wife" pits an older man against his wife's infatuation with a gambler her own age; "Saratoga" also testifies to the gambler's insatiable habits; and in "The Man She Loved," a socially ambitious dowager manque is determined that her daughter marry well. Cruel fate, not dysfunction, reigns in these clever narratives. At best, middle-brow fiction in the O'Hara-Cozzens mold.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89733-405-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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