A haphazard and unpolished set of tales despite occasional Southern charms.
A collection of short stories that aims to inject real-world drama into tales of the holiday season.
Editor Davis takes up the laudable challenge of shedding light on rural poverty in an often saccharine genre. A recently released prisoner struggles to buy gifts for his daughters in Laura Hunter’s “As Luck Would Have It,” a notable work that encapsulates a bleak realism one doesn’t often encounter in stereotypical depictions of Christmas. In it, the ex-con gets out of prison only to encounter a post–Covid-19 world of social distancing in which the cost of protective masks is prohibitive and conservative members of his family fail to grasp the pandemic’s reality. However, other entries in this anthology fail to reach similar heights. Many unfold too quickly, offering sketchy narratives that feel wan and lifeless. Others simply feel inconsequential; in one story, for instance, a narrator merely glowers at rotten kids in a mall, while in another, a narrator unremarkably ruminates on his dad while peeling an orange. A few clichéd, hopeful endings lack any grit to speak of, and a few tales take place outside the Southern United States despite the book’s title: Pete Black’s “Stille Nact,” with its bland report of a World War I truce, is the most obvious example. In addition, “Moonlight” features a distracting use of Southern dialect that feels mocking and garish. Ultimately, although a few stories stand out as rare treats—including Jennifer Horne’s wryly narrated “Halfway to Nashville,” which closes the collection—this book too often feels as if one is rummaging through a stocking full of coal.
A haphazard and unpolished set of tales despite occasional Southern charms.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 75
Publisher: BWPublications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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