A snappy idea buried by verveless writing.
Novel-in-stories about morbidly lonely thirtysomething women who find comfort in mortuaries.
The women here are bereft of men and angry about it. In the first, seemingly unconnected chapter, “Recovering Larry,” a widow of several weeks seeks to hold on to her husband by seducing men she finds at the cemetery and re-creating with them the matrimonial communion. In “Shrinking Away,” a shopaholic debtor and Upper West Side daughter, Helen, commits a final desperate cry for love by stealing the ashes of her lover-therapist, Marty, who stepped into an elevator shaft. These are savvy, well-educated people, mainly in New York City, born into wealth and fortune and yet lacking satisfying love-relationships. Their obsessive stalking of others to assuage their gnawing loneliness can border on the creepy: in “Versions of You,” Shannon, the fat girl in the Fifth Avenue office whom no one likes, fixates on the skinny, chronically hung-over Lilly and bestows on her a set of encyclopedias Shannon has bought from a dubious salesman type who reminds her of her father. “Addressing the Dead” pursues the sad affection a newly motherless daughter strikes up with her mother’s funereal cosmetologist; while “Post Dated” chronicles the mortifying moments of a doomed blind date—the man ends up murdered. Ultimately, each protagonist reappears in the title story (the last and longest). There, Nina Perlman, incognito, recounts her systematic, daily visits to funeral services in order to find connection and consolation with the grief-stricken relatives: “Will you love me?” she ponders while meeting these strangers, who either draw her in with gratitude or cast her out in repulsion. Newcomer Strauss achieves cohesion, but her writing snags on the lamentably pedestrian (“anxiety rising in her chest like a soufflé baking in the oven”), while her characters, similar in background and voice, begin to sound like one another.
A snappy idea buried by verveless writing.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30917-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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