This compilation of 36 tales, with eight never before published in book form and the remainder drawn from this prolific author's five story collections, starkly illuminates Beattie's strengths and limitations. Her spare, unfussy style, her pitch-perfect ear for the manner in which we really speak to one another, and her sharp analysis of the ways in which disaffection and loss deform relationships and character are all abundantly on display here. As in Beattie's novels (My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, 1997; Another You, 1995, etc.), the best of these tales (including "Where You'll Find Me," "Learning to Fall," and "Waiting") offer a unique portrait of American anomie; her characters know that they are lost, are desperate to make contact, but are also deeply wary of doing so—they are deeply hurting and hidden by turns. But Beattie walks a delicate line, and frequently her depiction of alienation becomes itself alienating, and her chill vision (as in, say, "Where You'll Find Me") becomes a bit too insistent and unvaried. At her best, Beattie is a perceptive and unsettling writer; at other times, her portraits seem formulaically downbeat and unpersuasive. Both versions are on display here.
Pub Date: June 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45506-X
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
In Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid (the Flo and Rose stories), Canadian short-story writer Munro drew unusual strength and sharpness from the vivid particulars of growing-up with—and growing out from—a stifling yet intense Canadian background. Here, though a few of these eleven new stories reach back to that core material effectively, the focus is looser, the specifics are less arresting, and Munro's alter-egos have moved on to a real yet not-always-compelling dilemma: over 40, long-divorced, children grown, these women waver "on the edge of caring and not caring"—about men, love, sex. In "Dulse," an editor/poet vacations alone, away from a troubled affair—and is confronted by sensuality on the one hand and the "lovely, durable shelter" of celibate retreat on the other. Two other stories feature the hurt and compromise involved in "casual" affairs—casual for the man, perhaps, less so for the woman. And in "Labor Day Dinner," the divorced woman is trying again, but with a sometimes-cruel man ("Your armpits are flabby," he says) whose love must be periodically revived by her displays of (unfeigned) indifference. Still, if these studies of to-care-or-not-to-care uneasiness lack the vigor of earlier Munro (at their weakest they're reminiscent of Alice Adams), a few other pieces are reassuringly full-blooded: "The Turkey Season," about a teenage girl who takes a part-time job as a turkey-gutter and learns some thorny first lessons about unrequited love; the title story, in which a woman's trip to the planetarium illuminates her turmoil (a dying father, a rejecting daughter) with metaphor; wonderful, resonant reminiscences about the contrasting spinsters on both sides of a family. And Munro's versatility is on display in other variations on the caring/not-caring tension—between two aging brothers, between two octogenarians in a nursing-home. Only one story here, in fact, is second-rate ("Accident," an unshapely parable of adultery, guilt, and Fate); Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout. But the special passion and unique territory of her previous collections are only intermittently evident here—making this something of a let-down for Munro admirers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0679732705
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
IN THE NEWS
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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BOOK REVIEW
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