Pride of place in this second collection of ten stories by Dark (Naked to the Waist, 1991) is given to a tale that has already become something of a contemporary classic. The title piece (successfully adapted for TV) portrays the restrained sorrow of a mother who cares for her adult son as he’s dying from AIDS, and her eventual realization that he—not her buttoned-up cold fish of a husband—has been “the love of her life." It’s the most immediately arresting, though not nearly the most accomplished, of Dark’s knowing, if occasionally slightly clichÇd, dramatizations of romantic obsession, marital discord, and family unhappiness. In “Close,” for example, a disoriented father-to-be wrestles—fairly predictably—with the temptation to cheat on his pregnant wife. “Home” depicts the confused reminiscences of marriage and motherhood of an Alzheimer’s patient being herded into a nursing home. And “The Jungle Lodge” portrays two sisters matured in different ways by a vacation in Peru with their doting stepfather. The more ambitious tales are generally better. “Dreadful Language” encapsulates the whole lifetime of a “judgmental” girl who coolly distances herself from loved ones, marries for comfort, and finds she has condemned herself to a life of unfulfillment. In “The Tower,” an amusing parody of Henry James’s tales of renunciation, a fortyish bachelor encounters at home and abroad an enticing young woman with whom he finds he must settle for a platonic friendship. The story even apes James’s penchant for injecting workaday metaphors (“Clara, . . . had depleted her tanks”) into otherwise ultra-genteel periodic sentences. And “Watch the Animals” deftly chronicles an unconventional heiress’s effect on her social set, in a story narrated in an eloquent first-person plural voice. Interesting forays into Cheever and Alice Adams territory, with a trace of Deborah Eisenberg’s range of subject matter. A generally worthy successor to Dark’s well-received debut volume. (First serial to Harper’s)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86521-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
A moving and memorable introduction to a worthy voice.
Six interconnected tales set in post–World War II Japan focus mainly on the evolving relationship between a melancholy literature student and the sweet waitress he marries.
Smitten from the moment he sees Shino at the crowded Tokyo restaurant where she works, the unnamed narrator of this collection has to summon considerable courage to court the 20-year-old waitress, who is already engaged to someone else. That fact does not stand in the way of true love, though, and the two marry quickly, in spite of his belief that his family is somehow cursed. Four of his five older siblings are gone, with two sisters committing suicide and his brothers running off to an unknown fate, leaving him to look after his parents and remaining disabled sister. Preoccupied with death and ambivalent about starting a family, he nonetheless takes strength from his cheerful bride, who has risen above her own sad history. Choosing an austere penniless existence reminiscent of a Dostoevsky protagonist, our hero dedicates himself to his writing, as Shino helps support him financially and emotionally after his graduation. And while the reader might think his choices a bit unfair to Shino, there is never any doubt that they share a deep intimacy. Eventually, expecting their first child, the impoverished couple returns to his rural hometown, where he must content with his past if he is to have any hope of a future, starting with the loss of his father in “Face of Death.” The author switches gears for the final story, “And All Promenade!,” which concerns a young father who must renegotiate his family role after a careless moment with his young daughter. No less powerful than the others, this final piece convincingly depicts both the strength and fragility of close relationships. A sensation when first published in Miura’s native Japan, the book, his first to be translated into English, is at times repetitious, but it is blessed with a lovely timelessness.
A moving and memorable introduction to a worthy voice.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59376-171-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.
Eighty-six-year-old Neider, a much-acclaimed Mark Twain scholar and Antarctica explorer (The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, 1956, filmed as One-Eyed Jacks), presents two short novels, apparently his first published fiction since the ill-advised A Visit to Yazoo (1956).
In the title story, George Barber, an American nature photographer, flies to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, the site of Mount Erebus with its fiery lake of molten lava, then boards an icebreaker, The Penguin, captained by Jack Torneau, who unaccountably takes a dislike to his passenger. Humiliatingly, the photographer is quartered not with fellow observers but in a far-off, dark, cramped rack with only a red light to see by. It’s a poor place to experience the gloriously described Southern Ocean, which has the world’s worst, most turbulent waters. Is the rather girlish captain, who has a weak stomach, fearful that Barber’s photos will expose his femininity? At the Grotto Berg itself, a spectacular thing with Roman arches so big the ship can actually sail into them, Barber gets his photos but disaster befalls the ship. In the companion novella, The Left Eye Cries First, Sid Little, 63, an early-retired Long Island attorney, has his second bar mitzvah and—at the urging of a friend’s lingering but fatal illness, and also of a dream of his homeland—decides that Gorbachev being in power is a sign that he should return to Ukraine. Sid hasn’t been there since his family fled the country when he was 11. His trip brings back rich memories of his Russian-Jewish childhood and early sexual experiences, there and in Paris. When he comes home to his still-alive but dying friend, his own health reassures him.
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8154-1123-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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