Chau is a distinctive voice, and if the stories are good, the sentences are even better.
Brilliant and strange, Chau’s arresting short stories delve into the emotional and sexual lives of second-generation Chinese-American women.
In the first of the 16 stories making up Chau’s debut collection, grand-prize winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project’s inaugural 2040 books contest, an unnamed woman hooks up with an old acquaintance—“the closest thing to a Chinese guy I had sex with, and that wasn’t saying much”—and finds, post-coitally, she has been split in two. “We will both be you,” she explains to herself. “You know you have problems with the Chinese you. I will just be the Chinese you for you.” Like many of the stories here, it’s a premise that shouldn’t work (isn’t it a little heavy-handed?), but in Chau’s hands, it’s electric: Her writing is almost alarming in its clarity, crisp and unselfconscious. Other stories are firmly rooted in reality. “I See My Eye in Your Eye” traces the paths of two sisters as they diverge in early adulthood. The older one is getting married, having a baby, building “a legitimate life.” Our narrator is not. It puzzles her, how this happened. “Somebody Else in the Room” is a hauntingly lonely story about the dissolution of a relationship in all its phases: the beginning and the middle and the end and all the phases after the end, when she is alone with his ghost. The women in Chau’s stories are sharp and self-contained and unmoored, caught in moments of transition, going or coming from someplace else. The same elements configure and reconfigure, and while the details of their lives don’t match up, they are versions of each other, all of them wishing they were someone else.
Chau is a distinctive voice, and if the stories are good, the sentences are even better.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939650-87-0
Page Count: 166
Publisher: 2040 Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Kinsella seems to be living off the capital of Shoeless Joe (1982) in this collection of sketches and one-trick ponies—more throwaways than fictions—about the bush leagues. In the title story, basically a footnote to the movie Field of Dreams (which was based on Shoeless Joe), Mike Houle, a promising ballplayer who chokes in the clutch, is sent by his agent to Iowa, where he is supposed to work his way back to the big time by playing for a small-town team. He soon discovers that the team plays intrasquad baseball exclusively; it's simply an excuse to recruit eligible bachelors. Houle doesn't complain, however; while staying with a local family, he's fallen in love with the girl intended for him. The piece is clever, cute, and sentimental, and the same might be said for most of this collection. In ``Searching for January'' Roberto Clemente, killed years ago in a plane crash, returns from the dead in search of January 1973, when time stopped for him. ``The Fadeaway'' shows Christy Mathewson (also returning from the Great Beyond) teaching a manager about his fadeaway pitch. In ``The Baseball Wolf'' a player becomes a werewolf and convinces the narrator to turn into an owl with a taste for kangaroo rats. ``The Darkness Deep Inside'' at least has a satirical spin with a little bite: A player who's born again loses his competitive zest and becomes, by virtue of his peaceful demeanor, a ``disruptive force'' on the team. Neither as surprising or comic as T. Coraghessan Boyle, nor as wry and smirky as Bruce Jay Friedman, Kinsella settles for corn pone and tepid standup routines here, instead of teasing magic from ordinary lives as he does in his best work. Minor-league material.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017188-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Searle’s Ivy League eroticism is only mildly disturbing in the stories, but her novella demands attention for its nuance as...
A second collection from Iowa Short Fiction Prize–winner Searle (A Four-Sided Bed, 1998, not reviewed): five stories and a novella centering on two subjects not often linked: family and exhibitionism.
In the eponymous novella, a 29-year-old actress named Kathryn becomes a local celebrity in Lowell, Massachusetts, when she’s scouted for the role of skating star Nancy Kerrigan in a TV drama. Meanwhile, teenager Daniel tacks posters of himself over those announcing Kathryn’s upcoming one-woman show at the Lowell Auditorium. Daniel is obsessed with the concept of celebrity, and with Kathryn as object of desire. Kathryn, whose excitement about the Kerrigan role is mitigated by her guilt over embarrassing her mentally handicapped sister in a TV promotion, unwittingly helps Daniel satisfy both his obsessions—with devastating consequences. Searle deftly slides between her two protagonists, showing the wobbly boundary between Kathryn’s normal, if slightly neurotic, ambitions and Daniel’s more twisted craving. The majority of the remaining tales deal with intellectually superior young women whose hunger for attention gets them in trouble. In “Memoir of a Soon-to-Be Star,” a young girl pretends not to know that her retarded brother is watching as she takes an exaggeratedly sensual shower. A graduate student closing up her dead aunt’s house (in “What It’s Worth”) flirts condescendingly with the hunky moving-man she’s hired. The protagonist of “101” allows herself to be photographed by her teacher as she’s having virtual intercourse with the teacher’s husband. Sex is less central in these stories than the need to be desired and the power it offers as substitute for love. The final piece, “Celebration,” about a couple trying to have a child, seems slightly out of place after so much dark neediness, though it’s linked to the collection’s leitmotif of less-mentally-able family members.
Searle’s Ivy League eroticism is only mildly disturbing in the stories, but her novella demands attention for its nuance as well as its wallop.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55597-324-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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