A smart, empathetic, well-crafted first collection—Antopol is a writer to watch.
The impressive debut collection by Antopol (National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Awardee; Wallace Stegner Fellow) features a variety of settings—Israel, Belarus, California, Poland, Maine—and characters, but it also has an unusual cohesiveness for a first collection.
Most of the characters here are Jews of Eastern European extraction; most are grappling, in one way or another, with issues of estrangement: from home, from family members, from the big ideological/idealistic causes they once espoused, from themselves. In “The Unknown Soldier,” set in California at the time of Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts, a young Russian-American actor emerges from a year in prison for contempt of Congress—a rap he takes despite being a communist of convenience, so as to aid his movie career, rather than of conviction—and tries to reconnect with his 10-year-old son. “The Quietest Man” centers on a Czech dissenter and émigré-turned–American professor who, a quarter-century after his departure from Prague and nearly as long after a divorce brought on by his selfishness, is terrified that his semi-estranged daughter, a playwright, has written a scarcely veiled indictment of his failures and inattentions. The harrowing and poignant “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” depicts a ragtag band of World War II teen guerrillas who call themselves the Yiddish Underground. Antopol offers complex, psychologically subtle portraits of her often regretful characters, and the details—child revolutionaries carrying sharpened branches through Eastern European forests during WWII since, at a distance, they can pass for rifles or Czech dissidents who must compose their plaints against the government longhand since “the government had a record of everyone who owned typewriters”—are chilling and persuasive.
A smart, empathetic, well-crafted first collection—Antopol is a writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24113-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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