A diverse collection of rich and eloquent tales.
These short stories of awkward relationships and crossed destinies take readers to such unusual locations as post-Soviet Russia, the Juilliard School campus, and a state-of-the-art penitentiary.
DePew’s (The Melancholy of Departure, 2013, etc.) collection takes its name from a song in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which features prominently in the title story. In it, a theater company ventures into Russia shortly after the fall of communism, and they must contend with the shaky environment and its foreboding politics. At the story’s center, Arthur and Irene are close friends and confidants, but their inexplicably platonic relationship becomes strained as uncertainties mount. As they try to explain their artsy gibberish to the cynical Russians they meet, the Western thespians echo the stories’ major motif of artists in crisis. In each of the narratives, a creative professional attempts to reconcile artistic endeavors with the confusion of ordinary life. In “Blind,” Jacob and Miranda are musicians who can’t get their marriage to harmonize; Jacob is too stiff and literal to keep Miranda’s attention, so she prefers the company of a dramatic gossip named Frank. Each story happens in a unique place and time, and the characters endure a variety of burdens, but in each, their desire to be artists is hindered by painful contact with other people. The protagonist of “La Casita,” for example, is a painter who declares, “I have to confess that I’ve sacrificed the sacraments for pigment and linseed oil and scratching away at a surface all day.” The sentiment is beautiful—but then he adds: “And for this I’ve been sent a particular torture: postmodernism.” DePew’s patiently told and beautifully crafted stories are lengthy; three are so long they might be classified as novellas. However, that fact gives the author the space he needs to build two worlds—the artists’ inner lives and the daily existences they struggle with. Overall, they reveal both the turmoil of creativity and the meandering beauty of ordinary human interaction.
A diverse collection of rich and eloquent tales.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990768005
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mixed Messages Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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