A varied but reliably compelling collection of prose.
People search for meaning in Cairo, Buffalo, and beyond in Street’s debut collection of stories and essays.
The author, who died in 2012, left behind an impressive body of short fiction, which is assembled here along with a number of personal essays. Several of the stories are set in Egypt, where Street taught for four years at the American University in Cairo. In one, a couple from New York on the verge of a breakup share a cafe with a corpse wrapped in a white sheet. In another, an Egyptian tennis instructor is baffled by his American student, and not just because neither of them speaks the other’s language. A Ptolemy-obsessed English instructor heads to a desert oasis despite the impending war to visit a famed oracle from antiquity. An expat diving instructor checks out other expats on a scuba expedition in the Red Sea, as Street describes with his typical dry humor: “He’d chatted with the Californian enough already to have learned her state of origin, but he didn’t like to hit on a woman until he knew they both wouldn’t be stuck on the same boat the next day.” There are also stories set back home in America: A grad student works in a laundromat, a bully visits one of his victims who has recently been in a car accident, a man teaches a boy he’s never met how to fish. The book concludes with eight personal essays, many of them about Street’s life in Obama-era Buffalo, New York (he discusses such topics as the elderly, opinionated neighbor that he begrudgingly befriends and his experiences taking the bus) as well as a few miscellaneous pieces on Russia and life in academia. As Don Eron writes in his introduction to the collection, “Street doesn’t give instructions about how to live, or preach that he has a better idea. All he does is report from the front.”
Street is full of brilliant observations about expat life. One American in Cairo, preparing for a party he doesn’t want to attend, thinks, “It would be no worse than he’d expected: another strained expat evening, everybody trying to make up for the impermanence of their circle with the intensity of their delight in and concern for each other.” The line appears in the title story, one of the collection’s strongest. It follows a language instructor bent on leaving Egypt; he is planning to break up with his girlfriend, only to learn something unexpected about her past romantic life that causes him to interfere with another couple’s engagement. Street is a shrewd observer of human personality: “After all, he’d come eight thousand miles for her sake, professing cultural curiosity, but she knew better,” a woman observes of her boyfriend. “Marty wouldn’t cross a street unless he knew what he wanted on the other side.” Though the stories are better than the essays (which arguably prolong the book unnecessarily), there’s a hard-earned wisdom and quiet craftsmanship to all of Street’s pieces, making it difficult for the reader to ever tire of them.
A varied but reliably compelling collection of prose.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781958015063
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Contingency Street Press LLC
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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