Millhauser remains gifted at stretching time, space, and expectations.
More turmoil and magic in suburbia from one of America’s most accomplished short story writers.
The latest collection from Millhauser revisits some of his favorite subjects. There are pivot points in adolescence: “One Summer Night” turns on a young man’s seduction by his girlfriend’s mother; “The Fight” sketches a conflict among boys; and “The Change” follows the anxious thoughts of a 15-year-old girl walking home at night. There are satires: “Thank You for Your Patience” darkly spoofs phone-hold platitudes, while “He Takes, She Takes” does the same for breakup patter. But most of the stories, and by far the strongest ones, explore community norms, stretching and mocking them to better expose their limits. “After the Beheading,” with echoes of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” is set in a town that’s implemented a guillotine with some troubling aftereffects. “The Little People” imagines humans cohabiting with Lilliputian neighbors, while in “The Summer of Ladders,” a community’s efforts at roof repair begin stretching toward the clouds. In “Green,” a neighborhood goes all-in on xeriscaping, eradicating its trees and plants; in “Theater of Shadows,” a town strives to become as black as possible. (“Babies wore soft black diapers. People blew their noses into black tissues.”) Each of these stories is open to interpretation as a study of prejudice, suburban narrowness, and groupthink. But Millhauser has always been too slippery a writer to pursue such obvious meaning-making; more often, the effect is that of Borges-ian strangeness and delight. That’s especially on display in one of the longest stories, “Kafka in High School, 1959,” which poignantly imagines the bleak-hearted author in spit-shined Eisenhower America, and “Late,” a comic riff on a late-arriving dinner date.
Millhauser remains gifted at stretching time, space, and expectations.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780593535417
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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