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SMALL SPACES BETWEEN EMERGENCIES

Name: SMALL SPACES BETWEEN EMERGENCIES
Author: Alison Moore
ISBN: 1-56279-022-6

STORIES

by Alison Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 1992

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Eleven stories, mostly about women in trouble who are drawn to one another—in a first collection that's moving, even when it tends to be formulaic and predictably minimalist. The best here are ``Leaving by the Window,'' about a narrator who travels with her widower father in a series of cars (``After the funeral it seemed we began to look everywhere for her'') until she runs away to New York, where she's raped. ``Rain Dance at Blue Cloud'' concerns a girl whose mother leaves her and whose father deposits her in Custer, South Dakota, at the Blue Cloud Inn, where she works for Louise—the ensuing slice-of-life is evocative and carefully developed. In ``Recovery,'' the narrator meets a new tenant recovering from cancer and befriends her even as the cancer returns in a terminal form. ``The Ways We Hear About It'' follows two daughters who return home to their father and stepmother—where the characters reveal to one another various illnesses and separations. The moments are appropriately small and delicately rendered. The same could be said of the rest. ``News from Another World'' concerns a nursing-home resident who kidnaps a baby for an afternoon; ``Turnaround,'' a father who sees his son for the first time in years and travels with him on crosstown buses; ``Communique,'' a man and a woman who read each other's journals; and ``Boojum,'' a widow dying of cancer who goes to Mexico and comes to an epiphany while staring at a boojum tree out of its habitat, ``a wanderer from a small close-knit clan.'' Such metaphors dazzle and often transcend the bleakness here. A promising writer with a small, honest talent, Moore gives her characters their due and lets them work out their lonely destinies for themselves.

Pub Date: June 8, 1992

ISBN: 1-56279-022-6

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
DEATH AND THE SEASIDE
by Alison Moore

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PRE-WAR HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES
by Alison Moore

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LIGHTHOUSE
by Alison Moore

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SEASONS OF HER LIFE

by Fern Michaels ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994

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A fat pancake of a novel, the author's second hardcover production tells the life story of one Ruby Blue—from an abused childhood and youth, to years as wife of a Marine, personal liberation, life in the world of industry, and her golden years in a rural retreat. Throughout the career of Ruby Blue, monster men abound. There's Papa George in their Pennsylvania home, a slasher, smacker, and wife beater, who requires that his daughters repay him, in bucks, for the cost of raising them. Then there's Ruby's husband, Andrew (met in those WW II glory days in D.C.), who is heavy on the verbal abuse and generally amoral. Ruby's lifelong friend Dixie is regularly slugged mercilessly by husband Hugo. Ruby's longtime true love, Calvin, is a gentle soul, but his wife, Eva, is as lethal as the men; fortunately for Calvin, she lacks the biceps. Ruby weathers life with Andrew at Marine bases and puts up with his callous treatment of their two children, but after Andrew admits to having gambled away their son's college money she finally decamps to New Jersey. Ruby soldiers on with Dixie, and their kitchen cookie business goes international in no time. As for the men, they'll get theirs: Papa George is Bobbittized with scalding grape jelly; the late Hugo's ashes get lost in traffic; and Ruby dumps Calvin. But Andrew sees the light. Glop. However, bear in mind the author's smashing success in paperback, including her Texas saga (5 million sold).

Pub Date: April 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-345-36774-X

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLOSSOM SISTERS
by Fern Michaels

- BOOK REVIEW
BREAKING NEWS
by Fern Michaels

- BOOK REVIEW
SWEET REVENGE
by Fern Michaels

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.