Spare and occasionally funny takes from a writer who hasn’t yet found her voice.
A gaggle of New York guys and gals hunt for love and meaning in debut stories that occasionally tickle the fancy but leave little flavor.
Grodstein has an easy way with the pen but a more difficult time making impact in a collection that aspires to a higher class of wit than it attains. “Lonely Planet” helps set the tone. The deluded narrator, Julie, tells about the night she ran over to a bar to console her friend Allan after he broke with his girlfriend Dorie. The evening ends with the two back at his place while Julie does everything possible to seduce the soused Allan, going so far as to find the ring he’d meant for Dorie, putting it on, and spinning elaborate fantasies about their life together. That is, until Allan wakes up and sees her with the ring on. “Hey Beautiful” is a little fillip about an insecure girl’s night out with two of her (she thinks) more attractive friends. Grodstein knows how to set the scene—or at least how to throw in enough New York sights and sounds to give the stories a hint of weight—but her characters’ relentless shallowness quickly gets tiring. Surprisingly, the stories with male protagonists fare better. “John on the Train: A Fable for Cynical Friends” is a more digestible piece about said John, recently relocated from the Midwest, who lives in Queens and works at a men’s magazine in Manhattan. While the author’s cluelessness about his background occasionally comes to light—he “called old friends from the heartland to see how things went on the farm or at the auto dealer or with the new baby”—its story of John’s lonely crush on a girl who rides the same train into Manhattan has an earnest quality mostly lacking from the other pieces.
Spare and occasionally funny takes from a writer who hasn’t yet found her voice.Pub Date: June 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-89255-281-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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