Varied and risky, with brilliances and blunders on an occasional basis.
Seventeen stories—some of them false starts, some disguised plays, some genuinely elegant pieces—from the veteran playwright, actor, and Pulitzer-winner.
Shepard has written 45 plays and one previous story collection (Cruising Paradise, 1996). It tends to show. It’s as though he’s not always sure what to do with the freedom of prose—there’s an uncertainty over how to wade into a character’s mind without slipping into the voice one might use on stage. The best pieces here are the first (“The Remedy Man”), whose highly aggressive horse-breaking main character serves as contrast to those with only lightweight understandings of Shepard’s country in fiction such as The Horse Whisperer; and “An Unfair Question,” which flirts with Chekhov’s rule about guns and the third act; and the title story, about two old men and housemates whose friendship is challenged when their favorite Denny’s waitress chooses to bestow affections on only one of them. Fine portraits of teenagers—the particular timbre of their voices—come in stories (“Berlin Wall Piece,” “The Company’s Interest”) that nevertheless fail to add up to much. Tales that are focused primarily on a single conversation can be haunting, as in “The Door to Women,” in which a grandfather tries to educate a grandson who knows more than the older man thinks, while two tales set around conversations (“Betty’s Cats,” “It Wasn’t Proust”) are simply one-act plays in disguise, the first about an elderly woman who doesn’t want to get rid of her cats, the second, more significant and complete, about a man relating an absurd adventure in France to convince his mysterious listener not to go there herself. Shepard flirts with form: one story, “Tinnitus,” is composed entirely of voice-mail messages, and in another (“Living the Sign”) a mysterious narrator unearths the source of a scrap of Zen-style wisdom found on the wall of an even stranger chicken shop.
Varied and risky, with brilliances and blunders on an occasional basis.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40505-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
