Gustine’s debut collection examines the compelling lives and struggles of people we might think of as ordinary and the pain that can come from simply trying to make it through life.
It might be easy to mistake these stories, with their focus on the familiar, for quiet ones. The emphasis is largely on emotion and situation rather than drama, but this doesn’t detract from their power. In fact, the intensity of people we might pass on the street every day—a mother whose baby will not stop crying or a father driving across the country to clean out his dead daughter’s apartment—makes this collection all the more powerful. In “An Uncontaminated Soul,” for example, Gustine starts with a familiar picture of a woman living alone with more than 50 cats, but rather than creating a cliché, she instead makes Lavinia sympathetic, deep, and heartbreaking—not pitiful at all. The struggle mothers face in trying to protect their children is one theme that runs throughout this collection, and it links an Israeli woman whose adult son has been kidnapped by Hamas to an Ohio woman conducting nightly vigils in her backyard, armed with a child’s baseball bat against encroaching coyotes. The weakest moments come in stories that prioritize suspense, as in “Goldene Medene,” in which a doctor inspects incoming immigrants at Ellis Island. He handles infectious patients with a distracted air and imagines abusing his power to take advantage of a vulnerable woman in a way that feels tired. There is no easy resolution to be found in this collection, and the fact that life will, and indeed must, go on is both a blessing and a burden for the characters.
Gustine’s stories give the impression that in every life there is a story worth telling, of triumph and of pain, if only we take the time to look.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941411-19-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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PROFILES
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
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
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A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SHORT STORIES | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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