Mason has written some fine novels, in particular In Country (1985) and Feather Crowns (1993), but the short-story form has...
Four previously published stories, a novella and two new tales follow the author’s semi-autobiographical heroine in an uneasy back-and-forth between her native Kentucky and the wider world.
Like her creator, Nancy Culpepper is a farm girl who went to graduate school up north, married a non-Kentuckian and stayed away, without ever being able to much loosen the tenacious bonds that held her to her parents and her country roots. In modest, unassuming prose studded with simple, revelatory details, Mason (An Atomic Romance, 2005, etc.) traces Nancy’s odyssey over a quarter-century as her grandmother dies (“Blue Country”), her mother is treated for breast cancer (“Spence Lila”) and Nancy separates briefly from her husband (“Proper Gypsies”), sells the family farm (“The Heirs”) and learns she is going to be a grandmother (“The Prelude”). Son Robert is only a shadowy presence, and although Nancy’s fraught marriage to photographer Jack is subtly delineated, that too never has quite the emotional force as her relationship with her kin and her past. Mason writes with quiet authority about that most unfashionable of American subjects, class differences; we see that Nancy has always been the unusual one in her family, the one with her nose stuck in a book, “meant to use her mind.” But she never feels entirely at home among northern intellectuals, and we see that some of the problems in her marriage stem from Jack’s frustration with her overriding commitment to her birth family. Yet, as Nancy acknowledges in “The Heirs,” “she had gone away and not shared her life with them, except in her imagination.” This story and “The Prelude” remind us that such divided loyalties are the lot of every artist, no matter what her origins.
Mason has written some fine novels, in particular In Country (1985) and Feather Crowns (1993), but the short-story form has always seemed especially congenial to her; there’s hardly a wasted word or a sloppy sentence in this quiet, gently moving collection.Pub Date: July 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50718-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
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
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