Separation anxiety and strong emotion repressed almost to the point of suffocation are the constants that are analyzed—with sometimes excessive precision—in this otherwise impressive gathering of six carefully crafted stories by the author of an earlier collection, In a Father’s Place (1990), and the novel Mason’s Retreat (1996). The premises and animating situations are often quite striking here. “The Late Night News,” for example, forces a complacent widower and ex-husband into panicked self-doubt when a teenaged burglar (“a messenger from the dark”) violates his isolation and security. A husband and father heading home from a job-hunting trip finds in a “ruined” western town (in the moody title story), a chastening reflection of his own unhappy domesticity. “Something Important” about his endangered marriage is revealed to a cautious high-school English teacher by the boorish older brother he disrespects and mistrusts. And a New Englander returned to his late mother’s Montana ranch (in “Room for Mistakes”) makes peace as best he can with his taciturn, cleareyed stepfather. The mingled intimacy and unknowing we share and suffer as family members are unforgettably dramatized in the best pieces. In “A Suitable Good-bye,” thirtysomething freelance consultant Lee travels with his widowed mother and young nephew on a mission to find the grave of her father, who had abandoned his family decades ago—and learns that their journey has been a gesture intended to soothe Lee’s own incompletion and loneliness. And the superb “Things Left undone” charts the emotional odyssey of dairy farmer Denny McCready and his wife Susan, their marriage ripped apart when their infant son dies of inherited cystic fibrosis, then tentatively given the possibility of repair as they labor to forgive each other and themselves. There’s a little of Tobias Wolff in Tilghman’s rigorous focus on how family concerns define us and haunt us. The way his people run occasionally feels contrived, but in his best stories we feel deeply for them and wish them safely home again.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44971-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flat, emotionless style deadens the impact of this debut collection of short stories and a novella. Nasty and neutral men (and boys) people these stories, but a good one is hard to find. In ``Starkweather's Eyes,'' the narrator remembers the time shortly after his father left him and his mother in Nebraska, where a serial killer roamed. Carroll is ``Babyman,'' a con artist who impregnates women in order to sell the resulting children. The narrator of ``What Hurts the Fish,'' a boy spending his days with a woman named Evelyn—who wears a special prosthetic shoe because she was dropped and crippled as a baby—starts out sentimentally (``I love Evelyn, but I'm afraid of her shoe''), but soon shoots another boy in the eye with a BB gun and hides what he has done. Condon's female characters are equally unfeeling. In ``Coffee,'' a woman whose father called her ``sex-sick'' when she got pregnant at 18 coolly has sex with a man her now 11-year-old son met at the beach. ``The Velvet Shelf'' shows Natalie responding to her boyfriend being brought to her door by the police (he buried her puppy after it was run over by a car, then went back to dig it up, fearing that he'd buried it alive) by taking it as an opportunity to break up with him. There is plenty of violence too. In ``The Emptyheart Boy'' a recently divorced man listens to his female neighbor being abused by three low-lifes without doing anything, even when his girlfriend urges him to, because ``down deep I was afraid of people, period.'' The short novella ``River Street'' follows a drifter to a sleazy motel where he is attacked and raped. Too macho for its own good.
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-87074-372-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
This is Self's first book, an interconnected collection of stories published in England in 1991 but held back in the US until the moment Self attained trans-Atlantic culthood. Self (My Idea of Fun, p. 243, etc.) has previously proven his skill at phantasmagoria, but he's less impressive here. Sharply tweaking a spectrum of mental health and social work philosophies, Self is on a mission to point out that therapists who treat delusional problems are themselves the ones with the problems. In the title story, a mock academic paper, a psychology researcher explains how he came to discover the remarkably unscientific Quantity Theory—which holds that there's a fixed amount of sanity in any given society at any given time, and a small patch of insanity in one area of that society will result in a small patch of sanity elsewhere. (Eventually ``psychic field disruption,'' planned insanity to create sanity for someone else, becomes a popular self-help routine. It's just the karma theory, given a spin of European nihilism.) Self's working method for this collection becomes apparent too quickly: He hits on a kooky, half-true theory, then backs up into his parking space. But his stories are contrived in their efforts to shock us, and the ideas themselves are like outtakes from undergraduate stoner-philosopher what-if sessions. It's only when Self gets away from his adman mentality to really do some great, not readily marketable writing that we catch glimpses of his brilliance—as in ``Mono-Cellular,'' which shifts from a first-person account of experiencing life through the senses into fabulous elliptical blather, like the best of the late-period, whacked-out CÇline. Those sympathetic to Self's fantasies, which can be fun-house amusing, should read where he came from to know how much he's evolved.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-585-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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