As the title suggests, there are animals throughout these stories, with the human ones as inscrutable as any.
A debut collection of stories—one of the best in recent memory—that finds psychological acuity within characters who are unreflective or even impenetrable.
Ryan (Writing/Sarah Lawrence) has plainly been honing his craft, because the 13 tales here are the work of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing—and challenges the reader to figure out how he’s doing it. Not that the stories are difficult or experimental, but they often seem to begin at a point where nothing is clear—who the protagonist is, what the situation is, where the tale is headed—and then they unfold as consciousness might, not in a linear fashion but making revelations through association or omission; those revelations might be clearer to the reader than to the characters. In “The Canyon,” one of the last holdouts among Laurel Canyon ranchers of the late 1960s finds himself caught between a group of catatonic hippies (who may well be the Manson Family) and aggressive developers; the taciturn protagonist draws on what he learned in the war, that “[i]t’s too easy to cross certain lines.” “The Good Life” is a miniature marvel, one paragraph that lasts barely more than a page but is a fully formed story nonetheless—one of many here about characters failing to establish a connection. The narrator meets a former classmate and eventually realizes she's mistaken him for someone she knew better. “I no longer understood who she was talking to,” he says as it dawns on him that her "good life" is a drug dealer’s mirage. “At Night” illuminates the unsettling relationship between a potentially dangerous voyeur and the waitress he stalks: “In her unwitting world, he is God,” the disturbed man thinks. Two of the best and most ambitious stories, “The Bull Elk” and “Fidelity,” defy plot summary; as with most of these tales, relating what happens wouldn't really tell how they work.
As the title suggests, there are animals throughout these stories, with the human ones as inscrutable as any.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9858812-3-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Roundabout Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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