Funny, pleasurable and often prescient short fiction that delivers many more hits than misses.
A career-spanning compilation of fascinating short fiction and flash fiction from Grayson (And to Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, 2006, etc.), ranging from his first published story (1975’s “Rampant Burping”) to fresh work.
Rooted in post-modernism, Grayson’s economical writing style abets a natural gift for storytelling, and his tales are imbued with a comic touch–whether darkly so, or merely playful. In one example of the former, a caustic protagonist in “Those Seventies Stories” pretends to be one of a pair of twin brothers whenever he frequents area diners in order to alternately abuse and sympathize with a dull yet harmless local. The immediately preceding “The Life of Katz,” on the other hand, seems to be little more than an exercise in enumerating a litany of dog- and cat-related puns and idioms. This kind of nonchalance usually plays to Grayson’s strengths, but sometimes his tendency toward self-indulgence gets the better of him. A few stories find the author employing tics to mark his fiction as quirky–“An Appropriated Story,” for instance, uses the copyright symbol as a scene break–or using formal subversion to oversell his point, as in “Unobtrusive Methods, Inchoate Designs,” whose narrator breaks the fourth wall to deliver a brief, meta-fictional address on the nature of reality and perception that only renders the story frivolous. At his best, though, Grayson deftly explores the dilemmas of suspended youth–specifically the ache of the lovelorn, the search for purpose and the tendency to cling desperately to the familiar. To many of his characters, this means remaining perpetually in academia, earning advanced degrees while struggling to choose career paths or endlessly returning to camp as counselors late into their 20s (“Life with Libby”). In “Albertson’s Pulls Out of New Orleans,” an Idaho transplant to the Deep South is almost unreasonably obsessed with a local branch of his hometown supermarket chain, to the point of ineptly transferring his affections for the brand onto one of its cashiers.
Funny, pleasurable and often prescient short fiction that delivers many more hits than misses.Pub Date: April 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-6152-0547-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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