A selection that should please readers who love the traditional pleasures of storytelling, through voices that are...
A typically strong selection, though this year’s offerings are less international in setting and more often realistic than in some recent years.
As a popular novelist with a creative writing, graduate school pedigree, Perrotta (Little Children, 2004, etc.) proclaims his preference for “stories written in plain, artful language about ordinary people. I’m wary of narrative experiments and excessive stylistic virtuosity, suspicious of writing that feels exclusive or elitist.” Thus, he has applied those principles to his selections in serving as this year’s editor. In addition to the stories themselves, one of the highlights of the annual is the explanation by each writer of the genesis of the selected story, and it’s interesting how so many of these had an autobiographical seed and are filled with detail rooted in the writer’s experience. Not that any of these stories is straight memoir, but one of the most powerful, “Diem Perdidi” by Julie Otsuka, elicits this explanation from its award-winning author: “Writing it, I suppose, was my way of keeping my mother with me in the world, a way of being with her even as she was slipping away,” and such context deepens the resonance of a formally inspired narrative in which most of the sentences begin “She remembers...” and the main other character, whom the protagonist doesn’t necessarily remember, is “you.” Writes Otsuka, “She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day.” The anthology mixes selections from perennials such as Alice Munro (who could well be “the single writer who looms over this year’s collection—over the art of the short story as it’s practiced in America right now,” according to Perrotta), Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders (the most experimental of the lot), with others who have yet to become as well-known and are published in smaller literary magazines.
A selection that should please readers who love the traditional pleasures of storytelling, through voices that are thoroughly contemporary.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-24210-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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