But Mason hasn’t been often at her best since early in her career. Sadly, Zigzagging does little to reverse the downward...
Appropriately homely imagery and dead-solid perfect dialogue help some, but don’t do nearly enough to animate the morose folks who wander through the 11 uneven stories in this third collection from the Kentucky author (Midnight Magic (1998); Clear Springs (1999).
Most of those characters are women returning to their old abandoned Kentucky homes in the wake of compulsive meandering, busted marriages, or affairs that have gone nowhere. For example, the earthy protagonist of “With Jazz,” twice-divorced, mourning the daughter who died in childhood, ceaselessly bar-hopping. Or Wendy, of “Night Flight,” seen “returning to the place she had once been so eager to escape,” hoping good-ol’-boy Bob may after all love her as much as he loves a good time; or divorced Sandra McCain (of “The Funeral Side”), back from Alaska to stay with her widowed father, a mortician whose dutiful relationship with death is in fact the source of his resilience and strength. Too many of these pieces recycle essentially similar premises and details, remain undeveloped, and trail off into inconclusive endings. Mason’s prose has a certain colloquial snap and lilt, and she’s capable of both quietly arresting metaphors (“Snow made hats on garbage cans”) and deadpan hilarious renderings of colloquial speech (“He had one eyebrow that went all the way across. Them’s the guys to watch out for”) that occasionally recall Flannery O’Connor at her devastating best. But on balance this is a disappointing volume, redeemed only by moments in “A Funeral Side,” and two unqualified successes. “Tobrah” recounts 40ish, (again!) twice-divorced Jackie’s slow, troubled bonding with her five-year-old half-sister, the child of her father’s old age, bequeathed to her perhaps as a mocking revelation of the comforts of motherhood to which Jackie has come too late. And “Charger,” about a 19-year-old working in a fertilizer plant and fighting off both depression and the temptation to settle down with his agreeably trashy girlfriend, is a laconic, bittersweet beauty.
But Mason hasn’t been often at her best since early in her career. Sadly, Zigzagging does little to reverse the downward trend.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44924-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
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