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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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