Honest and compelling stories end up smothering each other via their proximity.
Nineteen turbulent stories recount love, loss, and punk rock through the lens of midlife.
Behr’s second collection is composed of fierce, funny, biting tales that narrate the body’s relentless hunt for love, or transcendence, or maybe just a warm bed for the night. In “How Not To Be a Groupie,” the narrator relates how her younger self admired the “slacker, skinny” desirability of her band mates, Delirium and Anarchy, but ended up indulging in “groupie-adjacent” behavior like sleeping “with bad boys who treat [her] like shit.” In “Be Like the Woman,” the same, or a very similar, narrator briefly reconnects with a former lover from her late teen years in the Bay Area punk scene who’s in a “therapeutic separation” from his marriage and “puts his hand in [her] mouth after they kiss.” Many of the individual stories feature character types (if not actual characters) who repeat throughout the collection. This heightens the sense of fractured nostalgia—looking backward through a cracked lens—that shows up in some of the most successful stories. In the title story, Lover Monster reunites with the narrator after a 30-year separation only to die soon after of a rare disease. Here, the Portland author is mining elements of her own life. Lover Monster, in turn, is reflected in Tim, the paranoid Boeing engineer in “Cold Plum Wine.” The sweet, clingy, and temperamental Chinese baby, Yu Chen, in “Needle Drop,” is seen again in the character of teen baby, suffering through his parents’ divorce in “Be Like the Woman” and again as the boy traumatized by evidence of his mother’s sex life in “The Problem Was Starting.” On their own, these characters are fully realized, sympathetic, and surprising. The collection as a whole, however, suffers from a feeling of déjà vu, a static sense that the reader is dropping in again and again on the same story. The fact that each tale is genuine, and genuinely moving, goes a long way toward mitigating that effect.
Honest and compelling stories end up smothering each other via their proximity.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798950348068
Page Count: 156
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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