Beattie (Walks with Men, 2010, etc.) sometimes stumbles, but her mordant and frequently comic depictions of ways in which we...
A generous gathering of 48 stories first published in the eponymous weekly often defined by Beattie’s trademark understatements, ellipses and—let’s admit it—occasionally clichéd situations and plots.
Not all her best stories (e.g., “Jacklighting,” “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” “Park City”) share this lineage. But this big volume includes numerous seminal and influential portrayals of sensitive, self-absorbed young urban professionals succumbing to passivity and indifference, and eventually growing up and into a fuller engagement with the larger world’s claims on their rudimentary attention spans. Fashionable angst and forced eccentricity sometimes blur focus and blunt force in stories that feel insubstantial—a woman’s resentment of her husband’s supposed infidelities in “Downhill”; a defrocked fashion model’s yearning to reconstruct her unhappy life in “Colorado”; and an unattractive woman’s history of failed relationships in “Wolf Dreams.” Yet when Beattie eludes the entrapments of quotidian cliché, she commands a crisp, understated prose style and a talent for manipulating viewpoints into new ways of observing done-to-death conflicts. In “Snakes’ Shoes,” the breakup of a storybook marriage is felt most keenly by a sorrowful, silent brother-in-law. “Fancy Flights” looks at broken relationships through several variously sympathetic eyes—including those of a family dog. Elsewhere, Beattie displays increasingly more complex understanding of the varieties of awakened regrets and aroused fears of the looming presences of age and enfeeblement. In “Janus,” a gift from a former lover stimulates a complex meditation on the enduring, shaping power of the past; and “The Burning House” flawlessly dramatizes the moral awakening of a shallow woman doomed to understand that her closest friends are virtual strangers to her.
Beattie (Walks with Men, 2010, etc.) sometimes stumbles, but her mordant and frequently comic depictions of ways in which we persevere, screw up and usually survive our own foolishness give her better stories genuine power, and make them well worth returning to.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6874-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
Sensually charged and evocative debut collection of 11 stories set in a number of vividly rendered settings, including Paris, Japan, and Malaysia. A series of six related tales follow Cass, a young American raised in France, as she explores the uncertain terrain of desire, discovering, as she notes in the exquisite ``The Lights of Love,'' that the experience of love is tied in her imagination to the particular qualities of light, to the ``hidden and peculiar'' way in which love both illuminates and isolates us. A second related group of stories traces the collapse of a marriage and the emergence, in the title piece, of a woman's sensuality in her efforts to discover through love ``the language in which the world speaks to itself.'' Unusual, haunting tales.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57129-028-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The title is apt; this nimble debut collection of 23 stories takes a variety of chances, impressing by its audacity and originality. Budnitz, a Village Voice cartoonist whose fiction has appeared in literary quarterlies, seems a kind of homegrown surrealist, launching expeditions into strange terrain from such disarmingly mundane settings as back porches, hospital waiting rooms, and crowded city streets. ``Dog Days'' has to do with a man in a dog suit who takes up residence on the porch of a Middle American family, this after an unexplained disaster that has led to the gradual dissolution of society. In weird yet convincing fashion, the family—and particularly the young daughter—begin to treat the man, who offers a remarkable impersonation of a canine, as a dog. This leads to a ghastly ending when, pressed by hunger, the other members of the family suddenly realize that, in some parts of the world, people view dog as a delectable dish. ``Guilt'' offers a grimly funny take on family guilt, carrying filial neurosis to new levels of absurdity as a healthy young man is browbeaten by his two harridan aunts into donating his heart to his dying mother—having been assured by the doctors that he can live some time without one. In ``Directions,'' a variety of figures—a middle-aged couple going to the theater, a man who's been told that he has a fatal disease, a young woman apparently haunted by a collapsed affair, two tough- talking hustlers planning a score—get lost in the city and end up seeking guidance in a dusty shop where maps are sold and, apparently, the deity works behind the counter. Each of the characters gets the help he or she deserves. In ``Burned,'' a young couple are, quite literally, consumed by their passion. Throughout, Budnitz's wry, conversational tone is nicely leavened by precise lyrical passages. A good mix, overall, of the fantastic and mordantly funny.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18097-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
