Emotionally resonant stories for readers who feel wistful and unsatisfied with their pasts, surely a universal experience.
Lockhart’s (Elizabeth’s Field, 2015, etc.) collection of short literary fiction offers a series of character studies.
The 16 stories in this book follow folks in a small town in Maryland called Puckum and the surrounding rural area. The tone is set with the first story, “Beginning with Puckum,” which finds Christmas angels detaching themselves from lampposts on Main Street and sweeping across the landscape, wistful for what they once were and searching for reminders. That symbolism becomes more real in the stories that follow—a grandmother trying to keep her recollections of her family together, a couple tending to a farm and using each other for an uneasy stability, a widow confronted by memories bringing a bag of her son’s clothes to donate to a secondhand store. Most everyone in these stories has lost something. The characters have gone through divorce, watched loved ones die, or come to the sudden realization that the ideal life they’d hoped for isn’t going to happen. The landscape plays a part in enhancing this feeling of loss and nostalgia. Most of the shops downtown have left, replaced by thrift stores in “The Fox Fling.” “The Puckum Family Restaurant” is a classic diner where everyone has a well-established routine. The author imbues her character studies with impressive depth and insight. She has a knack for delivering a lot of detail in a sentence or two. The first paragraph of the final story, “Inside Out,” is a pitch-perfect setup: “He was serious, standing there with his hands in his pockets, his shirt pressed, shorts belted, clear, blue eyes peering down at me, and me, sixteen years older, looking off to the trees, trying to come up with an answer, annoyed at his impertinence.” The two major characters are introduced so the reader can see them and also feel the female narrator’s disposition. She ends up somewhere quite different from her attitude in the first paragraph, finding comfort in her uncertainty, at ease not knowing what might happen next but happy for the familiar things that surround her. And that’s also the note on which the collection ends, paralleling the arc from the opening story.
Emotionally resonant stories for readers who feel wistful and unsatisfied with their pasts, surely a universal experience.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944962-27-2
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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