Assured and perceptive, offering a view of another Southland from Chandler’s and Didion’s.
Vignettes of Latino life in Los Angeles, reminiscent of Michael Tolkin’s The Player in its sardonic range.
It’s probably safe to guess that most teenage girls do not receive each evening, as if in a daily affirmation, the instruction, “Mija, when you kill a man, you must find the weak spot that all men have and make him suffer pain as he has never suffered before.” Mama’s advice, happily, isn’t often followed literally in these sketches, but in most of them the men are revealed to be riddled with weak spots indeed, measuring out their lives—as do the women, for that matter—in coffee spoons, or at least in visits to Starbucks. Coffee, indeed, seems to have healing powers in the opening story, "Good Things Happen at Tina's Café." At least Yuban does, the stuff that the polydactylic protagonist Félix quaffs in the diner owned by the alluring Tina, who, by the end of the story, may or may not exist, just as Félix’s ordinary reality may or may not be a decaffeinated illusion. Enigmatic and suggestive, the story is an exercise in a gritty form of magical realism, complete with funicular railway. The lead in Olivas’ (The Book of Want, 2011, etc.) title story is less likable, deservedly proud of his accomplishments—“Those punks had no pinche empire, that’s for goddamn sure”—and a complicated enough character to stand up to a little Rashomon-ish examination through the eyes of several people who know him, in interviews conducted on behalf of a writer who just happens to be named Olivas (“a real pendejo”). Though often playful, the collection ends on a grim note as a family is torn apart by the “great wall” that a certain president touts, in an endless audio loop over a detention center loudspeaker system, as one that Mexico will pay for, “and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.”
Assured and perceptive, offering a view of another Southland from Chandler’s and Didion’s.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8165-3562-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
A brilliant collection of ten replete portrayals of family life, from an emerging storyteller (A Hole in the Language, 1990) whose generous command of the depth and range of her characters' lives suggests an American Alice Munro in the making. Marriage, parenthood, separation, and the desolating variety of loss are the emotional coordinates of Swick's fictional territorywhose geographic polarities are Nebraska and southern California. Her people, all unhinged by the miscellaneous pressures of relationship, include a divorcÇe (``The Other Widow'') surreptitiously mourning the sudden death of her married lover, teenage sisters who (in the title story) expertly play their estranged parents against each other, and a rootless twentysomething (in ``Moscow Nights'') who's just been dumped by his girlfriend and who's drawn into reluctant complicity with his divorced mother's adventurous new lifestyle (including her abortion). Swick's characters brood guiltily over their own failings; many, like ``The Prodigal Father,'' eerily envision the worst that lies ahead of the messes they've made of their lives. Nevertheless, her stories crackle with crisp, witty metaphors and observations (``she feels like some character in a soap opera, only not as well-dressed''). Her men are every bit as convincing and winning as her women. In ``The Still Point,'' a frustrated wife ditches her luckless failure of a husband, a ``repeat victim'' whose espousal of Zen Buddhism leads the story in several surprising directions. In ``Crete,'' a college teacher whose untroubled life contrasts sharply with his wife's history of violence and loss, is brought to a totally unexpected point of empathy with the sensibility he has never managed to share. And in the nerve-racking ``Sleeping Dogs,'' Swick's most ingeniously plotted story, a frightened husband and father discovers that his character failings endanger the family he now knows he loves above all else. Swick's richly composed stories appear frequently in The Atlantic and the quarterlies. One of our most visible storytellers, she is rapidly becoming one of our best.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017254-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The collected short fiction of the great Russian-born writer (1899—1977) who became a master of fiction in three languages and whose imposingly irascible presence on the 20th-century literary scene has perhaps obscured full recognition of his genius as symbolist, savant, and storyteller. There's little here that can be called apprentice work, even among the earliest of this rich volume's 65 stories, a gathering that ranges from the early 1920s through mid-1950s and assembles the contents of four previously published volumes plus 13 uncollected stories. Literary influences are only intermittently blatant (e.g., in the Chekhovian "Christmas" and Gogolian "Razor," and in "Bachmann," a disturbingly enigmatic account of a thwarted romance that reads like an early Thomas Mann story). Fantasy and supernaturalism are strongly present in such accomplished and eerie pieces as "Lik," "Tyrants Destroyed," and "The Vane Sisters," the latter being perhaps the most archly self-indulgent ghost story ever written. What may surprise many readers is the relative scarcity of tales in which Nabokov's notoriously Olympian sensibility is clearly revealed. Only in the icy "A Dashing Fellow" (whose lustful protagonist withholds from his conquest the news of her father's death) and the equally mordant "Details of a Sunset" do we feel a judgmental or condescending authorial presence. The many stories dealing with Russian emigres in Europe seeking aesthetic and romantic fulfillment, include several of Nabokov's most affecting: "The Fight," "A Guide to Berlin," and "A Russian Beauty" are prominent examples. Best of all, there's "The Potato Elf," a weird, troubling story of a fatal love triangle featuring preternaturally vivid characters and replete with ingenious sexual symbolism. The products of an incomparably rich imagination, these 65 wonders comprise a virtual education in how fiction—well, ought to be written. An indispensable book.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58615-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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