As Minot observes, there are “three strategies for survival.” We know two of them, fight or flight. As for the third—well,...
Twenty pieces of powerhouse short fiction.
Selected by a jury that includes A.M. Homes and Christine Schutt, this gathering of the current crop of PEN/O. Henry Award winners makes its own argument. Even so, volume editor Furman does almost nothing in her introduction to give the stories a context beyond “savage fierceness”; a more vigorous account of the whys and wherefores of the anthology, in the manner of Bill Henderson’s introductions to his Pushcart Prize collections, would have been welcome. If conflict is the necessary foundation for literature, then the collection abounds in it, to greater or lesser effect. Far and away the strongest piece, Tamas Dobozy’s “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived,” has the highly compressed makings of an epic reworking of Les Miserables, its setting a Hungary caught between its fascist rulers and the advancing Red Army, its dominant moods fear and shame. In “Pole, Pole,” Susan Minot outlines the toxicities within family and neighborly dynamics; Chris Adrian allows a grieving man to insult a small child to perfect effect in “The Black Square,” a fine piece of psychological writing; Lily Tuck’s “Ice” encompasses whole worlds, the landscape of the heart imposed upon the landscape of Antarctica, with its great herds of penguins: “They are small and everywhere underfoot and Maud feels as if she is walking among dwarves.” Conflict abounds, yes, but the greatest exemplars of that savage fierceness are stories that deal with the efforts of us puny humans to withstand the elements; much of Jim Shepard’s superb story “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” for instance, takes place atop a cliff, with little echoes of Max Frisch’s great yarn “Man in the Holocene” bouncing off the granite, while Matthew Neill Null’s “Something You Can’t Live Without” will give the claustrophobic new reasons to be glad they’re not trapped inside caves full of “blind wormy salamanders, hare-eared bats whose wings were silk fans brushing their faces.”
As Minot observes, there are “three strategies for survival.” We know two of them, fight or flight. As for the third—well, about that this well-chosen selection has much to say.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-47237-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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