A few clunkers, a few gems and many readable, very human slices of life.
According to the introduction by PEN/Faulkner finalist Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, 2003), these 20 stories from American magazines represent “southerners” rather than “Southerners,” the dividing line between realism and (mythic) stereotype.
Several stories straddle that line. R.T. Smith titles his lyrical but familiar anti-war Civil War story with an iconic Southernism, “Wretch Like Me.” The title of Clyde Edgerton’s “The Great Speckled Bird” is also blatantly iconic, and Edgerton acknowledges in his afterword—each writer describes his or her story’s origins—that his tale, about a thief who takes a Bible salesman as his assistant in crime, is a purposeful tribute to Flannery O’Connor; alas, O’Connor did O’Connor better. The more successful stories are firmly contemporary. In many of the best, young protagonists struggle with the kind of troubled families found everywhere. The opener, Holly Goddard Jones’s beautifully crafted “Theory of Reality,” delves into a young girl’s shifting awareness of sex and its danger. Ecological and emotional dangers present themselves to the young boy whose father kills infected cattle for a living in Pinckney Benedict’s “Bridge of Sighs.” In Mary Miller’s “Leak” and Daniel Wallace’s “The Girls,” girls broaching adolescence live in awkward affection with their fathers. In Amina Gautier’s “The Ease of Living,” a teenager’s mother sends him to stay with his ailing grandfather in Tallahassee to get off the New York streets. Social issues thread through the stories with mixed effect. “Child of God” by Jennifer Moses, about a former addict, leaves a do-gooder aftertaste, but in “First Husband, First Wife,” Jim Tomlinson uses drug-dealing and legal bureaucracy to create a heart-wrenching love story. And in “Back of Beyond,” about a pawnbroker named Parson who must visit his estranged brother’s farm because Parson’s nephew has stolen and pawned a shotgun to support his meth habit, Ron Rash turns what could be clichés of white-trash Southernness into a masterpiece on rectitude and family.
A few clunkers, a few gems and many readable, very human slices of life.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-612-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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