An uneven collection, unlikely to create a new audience for Greenman.
More stories from the New Yorker editor and indie-lit notable.
The title story follows a business traveler in the process of abandoning his wife and child, and it’s written in a distinctly alienating—almost mechanical—tone. This work first appeared in a project of Greenman’s called “Correspondences,” which encompassed both a limited-edition book and a forum for reader participation. Whether or not that project was a success is outside the scope of this review, but, in the context of this collection, the story is a dud. A McSweeney’s alum, Greenman is known for his willingness to experiment with form and style, and this is not the first time he has repurposed his own material (2003’s Superworse was a revised version of 2001’s Superbad). But too many of the stories here feel like exercises. “Barn,” for example, seems to exist so that Greenman can mimic the voice of a Nebraska farmwife in 1962, and it has an ending, seemingly fraught with meaning and pathos, that’s inconsequential. Some of the pieces merit the exuberant praise he has enjoyed in the past. “Against Samantha,” the tale of a young man who might leave his fiancée if he wasn’t so enamored of her mother, is a deep delight. It’s set in 1928, and Greenman achieves an authentically upper-crust, vintage tone, and the anxiety his protagonist experiences provides a bracing dose of weirdness that keeps the proceedings from becoming precious.
An uneven collection, unlikely to create a new audience for Greenman.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-198740-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A few of these gritty tales about military men have appeared in literary magazines, but they deserve a wider audience. Miller's characters have more in common than simply being members of the armed forces; they all have trouble making decisions. For people whose profession is war, they are surprisingly averse to conflict and often try to back away from it. In ``The Rifle,'' a lieutenant delivering an officer's remains to his family becomes embroiled in a disagreement between the dead man's wife and parents over who will keep the flag to be draped over the coffin, even though all he wants to do is leave town. Women are particularly suspect and mysterious to these protagonists. ``Bethune, South Carolina'' shows a soldier dating a Duke freshman who, though Catholic, has a pretty advanced vocabulary for 1965 (``I didn't find out what ejaculate meant until the next day, when I borrowed the first sergeant's dictionary and looked it up''). When she becomes pregnant and asks for $500, he arranges a cheaper abortion through a tough comrade. A mother staying with her son at a rented vacation cabin in ``Blackstone'' (Virginia) gets involved with a hard-drinking man named Billy Murdoch—who turns out to be AWOL—and begins neglecting her boy for long stretches. In the title story, a future enlistee watches from afar while his blackguard cousin seduces a prim piano teacher. Some stories fall short. ``Vancouver,'' which intersperses the saga of a man returning home from Vietnam with wartime scenes written in the style of a film script, rambles on too long, and a few too many pieces end on a note of quiet puzzlement that eventually becomes monotonous. But in the aggregate, this is an honest collection that successfully develops such recurring themes as guns and their misuse. An impressively serious and professional debut from a man who served in Vietnam himself and obviously knows whereof he writes.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-9642949-3-1
Page Count: 178
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A peek behind the Bamboo Curtain, where Chinese poet Ha Jin, winner of the latest Flannery O'Connor Award, works out the conflicts between tradition and constraint that animate his second collection (after Ocean of Words, 1996). Ha Jin, who writes in English, is a Chinese veteran of the People's Liberation Army and, although he doesn't address political dissidence directly in his work, the 12 stories here all contain that undercurrent of cynicism in the face of authority that's common to military (as well as Communist) societies. Thus, the soldier of ``A Man-to-Be,'' who holds back from taking part in a gang-rape, not only finds himself defensive about his own manliness but is eventually shunned by his fiancÇe's family, who doubt his ability to father children, whereas the hooligan boys who terrorize their fellow classmates in ``Emperor'' discover that their popularity and status increase ever higher with each new atrocity they perpetrate. The abiding tensions of peasant life prove themselves again and again to be deeper than the Party's ideal of the New Communist Man, as in ``New Arrival'' (where a childless couple refuses to adopt a beloved young boy entrusted to their care because of their fear of bad luck) or ``Fortune'' (in which an old man's faith in fortune-telling remains so absolute that he becomes willfully deluded rather than admit that his life has been ruined). Honor remains a powerful primordial force as well, best illustrated in the predicament of the dutiful Party member who disobeys his dying mother's wish for a traditional funeral and is promptly denounced by his comrades for filial impiety; or in the public degradation of a prostitute (``In Broad Daylight''), which, however harrowing, remains a less vivid spectacle than the degradation of her accusers. Splendidly fluid and clear: Ha Jin has managed to make an utterly alien world seem as familiar as an old friend.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-8203-1939-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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