These ingenious and lovable stories crack open the world.
Tragedies big and small are faced with indomitable wit in 12 stories.
The subjects of Perabo’s (The Broken Places, 2001, etc.) stories range from the slightly dark to the really tough. On the lighter side: middle school students blackmail their teacher after witnessing her messing around with the principal; a child gives her stuffed armadillo the name of her mother’s ex-lover; a lonely woman’s one good friend announces plans to leave town. At the blacker end, there’s a story that begins “My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking.” Or “The boy fell from the balcony sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning.” Both of those stories—in fact, each of the stories about death in the book—use metafictional elements in a way reminiscent of George Saunders, to illuminate the function of story in our lives, its power and its helplessness. In “Story Goes,” which gives The Fault in Our Stars a run for its money in the voice department, a teenage cancer patient tries to help a friend commit suicide. “If you close your eyes and listen very hard you can actually hear, through years and miles, my 15-year-old brain creaking forward like a long dormant watermill while I process this massive amount of new and confusing information.” Perabo’s facility with teenage narrators also shines in “Treasure,” about a plane crash witnessed from a high school football field and a good crush gone bad. “If life really can be compared to a hand of cards, I’m fairly certain that those cards remain facedown until sixth or seventh grade and only then do you get to turn them over and see who you actually are.” Stealth wisdom is the hallmark of this collection, hiding in each piece like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. As a former bike racer tells his catastrophizing friend in the title story, “Everybody gets to be a little pathetic. But you can’t have more than your share, or there’s not enough to go around. You can’t be a hog about it.”
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6143-5
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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