This year's collection of North American stories suffers from a bad editorial policy: unlike the British-based series (see Gordon & Hughes, below), this annual volume includes stories that are also being reprinted this year in books by their respective authors. As a consequence, nine or so stories out of the 20 selected here have already been reviewed—almost all positively—by Kirkus in recent collections by Richard Bausch, Madison Smartt Bell, Steven Millhauser, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Christopher Tilghman, and Joy Williams. Ford unapologetically includes two stories each by Bausch and Munro, and draws most of the others from the highest profile magazines—six from The New Yorker alone. All that aside, the remaining stories are a welcome batch. Lesser-known authors are represented by Patricia Henley's "The Secret of Cartwheels," a sad memory, full of repressed anger, of the narrator's four-month stay in a home for girls whose mothers cannot care for them; C.S. Godshalk's rather dazzling and un-sociological account of an inner-city savant whose lust for knowledge—as well as instinct for kindness—battles with his environment ("The Wizard"); and Pamela Houston's snappy, second-person meditation on a love affair with a man not her style ("How to Talk to a Hunter"). Newcomer Joan Wickersham's "Commuter Marriage," a yuppie whine, chronicles the difficulties of long-distance romance. Elizabeth Tallent further explores contemporary marriage and divorce in "Prowler," while Denis Johnson's equally characteristic (for him) "Car-Crash While Hitchhiking" is a hard-as-nails memory of a drugged-out vision of mortality. Dennis McFarland's timely and poignant "Nothing to ask For" finds a former alcoholic attending to his best friend dying from AIDS, the loyal buddy who set him on the road to recovery. Lore Segal's fabulistic blend of politics and magic in "The Reverse Bug" ranks with the best European fiction. But Padgett Powell's goofy narrative of a self-descried no-count booze-hound and whore-monger ("Typical") takes the honors as a work as profound as it is funny. A fair sampling of what's happening in American fiction today.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1990
ISBN: 039551617X
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
