Insouciant, twee, and aphoristic, Rutkowski’s voice handily skewers stupidity.
Rutkowski’s new flash-fiction compendium covers the gamut of hipster angst.
These 86 stories, most no longer than a page, resemble prose poems in that they highlight a single motif. Plot and storytelling play second fiddle to an Oulipo-esque obsession with language and wordplay. Puns abound, testing the average Anglophone’s tolerance for such contrivances: “When I hear ‘ice pack,’ I reach for an ice pick” (“Freon Drunk”); “Greekness, not Geekiness” (“If I Were He”); a linkage of “tantric” and “tantrum” (“At the Ayurvedic Center”). The proliferation of M’s in “McDonald’s Mania” goads McDonald’s own alliterative copy to hilarious extremes. Alliteration renders scatology sophisticated in “Caught in the Worst Way.” With additional insights bespeaking, perhaps, the perspective of maturity, Rutkowski reiterates themes and episodes covered in his earlier work (Haywire, 2010, etc.). These include tremulous childhood, subpar education, soul-sucking employment, the artist on the margins, the Asian-American experience, urban life, and the transgressive joys of tobacco. Stories often involve a turn that morphs the mundane into incipient madness, as in the OCD manifesto “Departure Checklist.” The unnamed first-person narrator common to all these short-shorts evinces alienation as he observes how his childhood pets’ feeding habits very closely resemble his own (“Pet-Food Dishes”), remarks on the vagaries of outdoor plumbing (“Our Basic Outhouse”), and imagines the palate of a dung beetle (“This Is the Shit”). Underwater real estate ownership is deplored in “Our Place.” In “Fuck the Dumb,” Rutkowski indulges in one of his favorite pursuits: disparaging literary conferences. A few stories, though, read like writing exercises picked up at those same conferences: “In College” begins every sentence with “I liked” or “I didn’t like.” In “UFOs,” each paragraph leads off with some variation of “The saucer man led us all away,” a device evoking a sestina or villanelle. As with a poetry collection, the stories here give up their full riches only on repeated reading.
Insouciant, twee, and aphoristic, Rutkowski’s voice handily skewers stupidity.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941550-58-8
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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