Riveting if polemical, and mostly bleak, depictions of America.
Bender, whose last book of stories (Refund, 2015, etc.) was a National Book Award finalist, generally uses world events as the background for fiction focused on domestic life, but these 11 stories make our current sociopolitical landscape the subject.
“Where To Hide in a Synagogue” sets the volume’s demoralized tone; while discussing with a friend how to protect their congregation from attack, a woman realizes their relationship won’t survive their disagreement over whom to trust or fear. Fear, along with anger and guilt, defines all the female, mostly Jewish characters here. Years after a woman is sexually assaulted in “The Elevator,” the trauma affects her behavior in another elevator. The protagonist’s financial panic underlies “Three Interviews” as she loses three job offers by inadvertently heightening the secret fears (maternal, romantic, medical) of her interviewers. Hidden hurts and fears push ultraconservative “Mrs. America” to campaign for the Senate whatever the moral and psychological cost. In “This Is Who You Are,” a teenager in 1974 struggles with both her Jewish identity and guilt over ostracizing a friend misused by a predatory teacher. The title story knots guilt and fear even more tightly as two contemporary middle-aged women admit the very different guilt each has carried since a deadly shooting at their 1970s middle school. While these stories explore relationships along with issues, “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement” abandons domestic realism, imagining a near future in which all jobs are government controlled, walled compounds house the unemployed, and a “national game show” awards contestants abandoned mansions. Liberal condescension mars “On a Scale of One To Ten,” about nonobservant Jews who briefly consider enrolling their child in a Christian school before rejecting “Jesus’s desire to love us.” The closing story, “The Cell Phones,” about a Rosh Hashanah service interrupted by needy callers, offers a tiny sliver of optimism for those willing to listen to each other.
Riveting if polemical, and mostly bleak, depictions of America.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-099-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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