An unrepentantly offbeat collection by an admirably free-spirited writer.
This unusual, sometimes-unsettling debut story collection provides the reader with an unvarnished look into the inner lives of a mix of curious characters.
Barrodale, an editor at Vice whose work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review, which awarded her its 2012 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, gives voice to characters who may be a bit creepy or crazy and who could maybe use more self-control, a clearer sense of purpose, or a better way to connect. The uneasy souls who inhabit Barrodale’s stories could stand to drink less, screw around less indiscriminately, and take fewer hallucinogenic drugs, but her portrayal of them is honest and unflinching, and she writes with an almost stark simplicity, unapologetically laying out their missteps and half steps toward and away from one another and themselves. In “William Wei,” the story for which Barrodale won the Plimpton Prize, a man spends his weeknights in his barren apartment, eating the same meal and watching the same movie, until a woman draws him out and takes him on a “bad trip” that changes his life. The male therapist at the center of “Frank Advice for Fat Women,” in the midst of a divorce, slides into inappropriate relationships with an attractive client and her even more attractive mother. The possibly autobiographical narrator of “Catholic,” meanwhile, fools around and falls in love with a married drummer, whom she drunk-emails as he tours the world and grows famous. When, sometime later, she sees him in concert, he catches her eye before the band plays "a song with the refrain ‘my is wrong.' " That could be a refrain here as well: the people in these stories are a little off—is it the drugs? The alcohol? Or are those just symptoms?—yet they are searching for something: a connection to one another, a grip on themselves. Like many of her characters, Barrodale’s stories can be undisciplined, at times veering off in confusing directions. But even so, they remain compelling. You never know where they will take you or whether, at the end of the trip, your life won’t feel at least a little changed.
An unrepentantly offbeat collection by an admirably free-spirited writer.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-29386-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
PROFILES
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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