A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.
Three novellas and two short stories quietly dramatize the outward manifestations of inner, emotional struggles.
In the short story “Giselle’s Tears,” the finest in Eron’s brief collection of fiction, Bart, the narrator, is a high school wrestler. He is largely neglected by his two sisters: Rachel, the popular one blessed with both brains and beauty, and Giselle, not similarly endowed by genetic fortune but always ready to grab the spotlight with her penchant for emotional fireworks. While Bart is lost in the shuffle, he forges his own drama when a pretty cheerleader touches his face: “But if some men date their sexual practice from the first girl they kissed, I date mine from the evening Marian Leigh Anberg touched my face.” In a casually informal, confidential style, the author sensitively captures the significance of that transformative moment for Bart, one that would follow him years later. In the novella The Chimera in the Plaster, Kal Norbert, an unspectacular college dropout and the “butt of the cosmic joke,” begins an improbable sexual affair with Calla Dakos, a promiscuous woman who is both receptive and indifferent to his advances. Kal is compelled to reflect on what might be either her secret power or weakness and reevaluate what he considers the “Kal Norbert Type.” All of the offerings are delicately thoughtful, though they can meander too long without focus. In addition, the author seems to incline in the direction of a kind of moral didacticism—the novella Misguided Missiles, the most comic of the pieces, chronicles the attempt by emotionally beleaguered private detective Bart Coldecker to find some meaning in his life by becoming a professional wrestler. While the tale is a genuinely funny one and impressively inventive, it concludes with a lucidity that seems more facile than edifying. Eron’s assemblage of fiction is brimming with promise, but here that promise is only inconsistently realized.
A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-958015-01-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Contingency Street Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
