Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.
Stories impeccably careful never to raise their voices, though not much is raised in the reader by them, either: a third collection from the novelist and storywriter (Escapes, 1989, etc.).
Cool-toned, expertly kept at a near-toneless pitch, Williams’s pieces have much about them of Raymond Carver, though not his brevity: too often the tales read long. Their characters seem driven in equal parts by meanness, confusion, and craziness, and few of them will charm—though Donna is certainly nicer than the bitchy friend she dutifully, and inexplicably, visits in the mental hospital (“The Visiting Privilege”), and the 11th-grade daughter in “Honored Guest” is far nicer than her monstrous mother, who admittedly is dying, but still. A mother whose son killed himself—he thought he had spikes in his head—gains a bit of sympathy when she repudiates the boy’s druggy and self-involved friends (“Marabou”), but no character has much affect in another death story (“Substance”), where a suicide leaves mundane belongings to various friends, including leaving his dog to one (the others ditch the stuff; the dog person feels she can’t). Tired tropes are revisited as affluent Americans are shown to know less than the Caribbean locals (“Claro”) or as spoiled American kids play at the ex-pat life in Guatemala, supported by their parents (“Fortune”). The ghost of Flannery O’Connor inspirits a tale or two: “Charity,” about an unhappily married and socially conscious woman who is drawn into progressively deeper trouble with a trashy family; and “The Other Week,” an intricate construction about an ex-alcoholic teetering toward an affair with her mentally questionable gardener. After her husband dies, a diabetic woman takes pistol lessons for a while and befriends her instructor (“Anodyne”); another widow, after an evening with her truly mean daughter (“Hammer”), falls off the wagon and dies five years later, at 50, amid a sprinkling of symbols.
Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-44647-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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