Literary fiction old and new from one of the contemporary masters of the form.
Much of this collection has been selected from previous works, including stories from The Knife Thrower (1998) and The Barnum Museum (1990). Settings range from the contemporary to the indefinite to the historic. “A Protest Against the Sun” is modern enough to feature a character in Goth-like dress and a teenage protagonist so introspective and sophisticated as to seem coequal to her parents. Conversely, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is set “when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution.” Millhauser’s latest work opens the book. In the first new story, “The Slap,” readers enter a bucolic suburban community where a nameless man has begun to slap people at random. Clad in a bland trench coat, the man may be striking out against self-absorption and self-satisfaction, or he simply may be unstable. He slaps. And then he stops. Readers are left to dream why. The second new story is “The White Glove”: Emily and Will, teenage partners in a deep platonic but not yet romantic relationship, are confronted by an odd disease that ends with Emily covering her hand with a white glove. Like much of Millhauser’s work, "The White Glove" touches upon the surrealistic and resonates with metaphors and allegories. A shorter piece is “Getting Closer,” six pages of exposition delving into a youngster’s reluctance to end the sweet anticipation of summer’s beginning. “The Invasion from Outer Space” offers near science fiction without robots and dying planets. “People of the Book” is a religious allegory complete with a virgin birth. Meanwhile, “The Next Thing” imagines a faceless corporation that builds a giant underground warehouse store—alluring and mysterious, a bizarre Sam’s Club submerged—only to take over the town above for its own executives.
Literary language, more introspection than action, much exposition, intelligent speculation about the human condition, all woven through sophisticated storytelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59590-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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