Sad, sexy, and significant.
A dozen stories, culled from collections first published in Canada, that straddle the line between sadness and sadism.
The recurring theme is the carnal appetite of the lonely—and the inevitable poor consequences that result when that appetite is sated. “Iglaf and Swan” follows the bitter, failed careers and marriage of a pair of poets caught up in their own lusts and intellectualisms as they give birth to a daughter doomed to suicide: “They only wished that the moment could go on, that they could always feel this important, tragic and redeemed.” The same story warns: “This is a dark story, growing darker still,” and so goes the collection. The failure of tortured romance may find its best metaphor when a blind man falls into a river and a dog tries to save him (“Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”). “A Guide to Animal Behavior” is a brief account of lives and morals so mislaid they can only be represented by fragments and non-sequiturs. The title piece consists of “the eternal triangle: recently released mental patient, woman and other woman from down the hall,” but the dynamics are unusual, with the group finding redemption as the mental patient narrator seduces his two women with stories of a life not lived. A family’s ghosts, meanwhile, in “A True Piece of the Cross,” take on tangible character as an old summerhouse comes to represent all the unspeakable secrets attendant upon filial love. Glover’s (The Life and Times of Captain N., 1993, etc.) mannered tales are often quite self-conscious in their telling, aware that they are fabrications of an emergent truth stronger than simple fact. Perhaps the author is too often reliant on aberrant sexual behavior for tension, but needlessly—these stories draw their power from a deeper source.
Sad, sexy, and significant.Pub Date: April 29, 2003
ISBN: 1-56478-286-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A short preface by Philip Young explains the raison d'etre of this presentation of the Nick Adams stories which here are arranged chronologically and therefore provide a continuity — from child to adolescent to soldier to writer — and reveal the character developmentally. There are eight new stories constituting 40% of the book and extending its interest as unpublished rather than merely republished Hemingway.
Pub Date: April 17, 1972
ISBN: 0684169401
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A literary tour de force of precariousness set in a blistering place, a state shaped like a gun.
In 11 electric short stories, the gifted Groff (Fates and Furies, 2015, etc.) unpacks the “dread and heat” of her home state.
In her first fiction since President Barack Obama named Fates and Furies his favorite book of the year, Groff collects her singing, stinging stories of foreboding and strangeness in the Sunshine State. Groff lives in Gainesville with a husband and two sons, and four of these tales are told from the perspectives of unmoored married mothers of young ones. The first, “Ghosts and Empties,” which appeared in the New Yorker, begins with the line, “I have somehow become a woman who yells,” a disposition the narrator tries to quell by walking at all hours as “the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.” Groff fans will recognize the descriptive zest instantly. The same quasi-hapless mother seems to narrate “The Midnight Zone,” in which she imperils the lives of her boys by falling off a stool and hitting her head while alone with them at a remote cabin, “where one thing [she] liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.” Ditto for the lonely oddballs telling “Flower Hunters” and “Yport,” the longest and last story, in which the reckless mother is often coated in alcohol. These are raw, danger-riddled, linguistically potent pieces. They unsettle their readers at every pass. In the dreamy, terrific “Dogs Go Wolf,” two little girls are abandoned on an island, their starvation lyrical: “The older sister’s body was made of air. She was a balloon, skidding over the ground”; their rescue is akin to a fairy tale. Equally mesmerizing is “Above and Below,” in which the graduate student narrator sinks away and dissipates into vivid, exacting homelessness. Even the few stories that dribble off rather than end, such as “For the God of Love, For the Love of God,” have passages of surpassing beauty. And Groff gets the humid, pervasive white racism that isn’t her point but curdles through plenty of her characters.
A literary tour de force of precariousness set in a blistering place, a state shaped like a gun.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59463-451-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
© 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.
