The survival of the cynics—in an abrasively intelligent Darwinian debut collection. Gilbert's ten stories, framed by two that include the Gal†pagos Islands as a sometime setting, show us characters creeping and crawling along a bumpy course of moral evolution. Although they've reached a relatively advanced point as late- 20th-century humans, that achievement brings them little happiness. These highly evolved people, in fact, seem mostly corrupt, confused, or amusingly, consciously callous. Maybe they have to be like this—a barrelling fighter's instinct appears to be their main means of preservation and their last source of defense, and Gilbert's unsentimental probing of their chances is both raucous and searching. He's unafraid of ugliness, which lends his fiction realism and sardonic thrust. In ``Anaconda Wrap,'' for instance, the potentially clichÇd vignette of a has- been Hollywood producer's one-night stand with his assistant is redeemed, comically, not by true love but by the brio of a small yet brutish mishap: While selfishly lost in the throes of her passion, this cold, base young assistant accidentally breaks the bone in his finger. Another man caught in a midlife crisis (``At the DÇjÖ Vu'') concludes a hangover by throwing up underwater at a sunny island resort, then watches incredulously as multicolored fish (unavailable or uncooperative while he studiously snorkeled) arrive en masse to swallow his upchuck. But Gilbert's moral scale is more panoramic than just this, and he also writes persuasively about war's consequences, about the rude pragmatists who call themselves TV journalists, about the urge to kill, and about the difficulty of telling one's story—and being heard. Interplay between weary life-veterans and blameless or frightened neophytes gives much of his writing its zest. The subtle Darwinian thematic harmonies of the stories, suggesting Gilbert's promise as a novelist, also distinguish a book that gives this basic advice: ``Keep moving. Please keep moving. Just survive.'' To the cynics go the spoils.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84306-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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