A collection of 13 stories offers Adams's (Medicine Men, 1997, etc.) usual blend of intimacy and the good life but also heavily plays the aging card, as story after story returns to the discontents of the middle years and beyond. The title piece is a case in point: aged Benito, a retired physician who used his killing in San Francisco real estate to fund clinics in his native Mexico, is still mourning the recent death of his wife—until shaken from his funk by an invitation to a party, extended by a much younger woman. Although the party is full of the dirty old rich, with some of whom Benito shares a less-than-savory past, he finds hope for the future in the possibility that his date seems to like him. That is, before she reveals that she's affianced to the son of their hostess. Women of a certain age fare little better: in "Old Love Affairs," for instance, a woman "almost old but lively," having gone through several husbands already, has one man kissing her feet while she tries to attract the attention of another. In "The Islands," a woman rebounding from the death of her Berkeley bookseller husband goes to Hawaii with a man interested in her, but does so only a few days after putting her (and her husband's) dear old cat Pink to sleep, so that the trip, tinged with sadness, is ill-fated-once her present company's true feelings about felines becomes known. The most sustained effort here, a series of four linked stories, looks at the tangled emotions of a psychiatrist, his alcoholic pianist wife, and his lover (another psychiatrist) as over time they pair, part, and realign, finding a kind of wisdom but no great joy in the ultimate configuration. With melancholy seeping into them, these plans for renewal fail more often than they succeed, in a pattern artful but distressingly familiar by the last page.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0671036181
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Characters seldom transcend their class, race, or gender in a pretentious collection of six stories and a novella, winner of Pushcart's 14th annual Editors' Book Award, by Trinity College (Conn.) English professor Pfeil. Politics is mostly gesture in these jargony tales of disappointment and unrealized desire. Lost innocence seems to be the point of ``A Buffalo, New York Story,'' the narrator's lament over the Cold War values he wholeheartedly embraced in his middle- class youth: Quotations from Life magazine provide the historical context to this tale of left-liberal guilt. Race is at the center of the pointless ``Gator,'' a reminiscence of the narrator's short friendship with a black man during his own hippie years; his present-day success as a Stanford MBA of course explains his implicit racism. Male sexual (hetero) guilt underpins ``Dirty Pieces,'' a typically puritanical bit of leftish angst over masturbation, horniness, and lustful thoughts about women. The link between politics and sex is further explored in ``The Angel of Dad,'' the story of Max the Rad, an aging (and unintentional) caricature of a New Leftover who decides to change his life when his father's ghost visits him. The joyful innocence of teens who spontaneously rediscover do-wop singing is undercut by their commercial exploitation—a TV ad that becomes their 15 minutes. The Ann Beattieish novella, ``Almost Like Falling,'' captures the sad lives of some '60s types who realize, in the '80s, that their lives are going nowhere, Reagan being partly to blame for their working- class miseries. ``Freeway Bypass'' is the most explicit political piece here, with supporting quotations from Marx and Fredric Jameson: It's a collage of voices—anarchists who deface billboards; an old-timer disgusted by their vandalism; a billboard- space salesman; and a South American refugee who survives for days on a highway divider after being hit by a car. Humorless tales, in all, from a tenured radical.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-49-9
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
A brilliant first collection of stories—many set in the historical past, and all concerning varieties of scientific pursuit and discovery—by the author of such well-received novels as The Middle Kingdom (1991) and The Forms of Water (1993). Barrett begins with a stunner: ``The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,'' about an unfulfilled faculty wife, her family's heritage of violence, and a telling incident in the life of the plant geneticist Gregor Mendel that impinged on the family's life and continues to cast long shadows over the woman's own psyche and marriage. The other six stories, all distinguished by a thoughtfully meditative tone and a firm focus on characters eager to analyze and understand their own natures, are almost uniformly rich and suggestive. ``Rare Bird'' describes the furtive rebellion of a gifted woman who, refusing to defer to her stolid brother's inferior intelligence, ingeniously escapes his—and their century's (the eighteenth's)—domination of women. ``Soroche'' relates a woman's progress through marriage, loss of husband and security, and toward fulfillment—ironically compared with the sad misadventures of ``Jemmy Button,'' the Tierra del Fuegan Indian uprooted from his culture and all but destroyed: It's a beautifully conceived tale, filled with mysterious grace notes and resonances. ``Birds with No Feet'' recounts the burning away of a young zoologist's illusions when he finds in Darwin's theory of evolution a mocking, yet strangely comforting explanation of his own character and fortunes. And the title novella, about a young Canadian doctor's existential adventure ministering to typhus- stricken Irish immigrants, re-creates with astonishing conviction a vanished time and place, and memorably examines both the despair and the moral courage of people who believe they can do no more, and no less, than, simply, what is right. Marvelous stories, unlike any being written today, by a writer whose continuing growth may well be one of the most interesting literary developments of the '90s.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03853-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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