Well-made, erudite, often witty short stories from an accomplished veteran of the form.
Trevor's (Girls I Know, 2013) second book of stories is nimble and smart—bookish in a mostly good way.
These characters, often academics, tend to be feeling hapless in middle age, and they crave life changes that their habits and mildness and shore-hugging aren't likely to allow—until Trevor puts them into collisions with big disruptive forces: a boyfriend who seems sprung from mythology ("Endymion"), an iconoclastic writer of experimental fiction ("The Novelist and the Short Story Writer"), the threat of exposure as an embezzler ("The Program in Profound Thought"). The satiric elements in these stories, especially toward their beginnings, can be a bit easy and overbroad, but by taking his characters' emotional plights with utmost seriousness even as he lampoons their circumstances, Trevor manages again and again to steer the stories into deeper, weirder, more fascinating waters. In "The Detroit Frankfurt School Discussion Group," for example, Colin, a recently divorced sad-sack adjunct instructor in English, having failed to reorder his life through golf, Thai cooking, learning Russian, strong drink, internet dating, and so on, is kidnapped off the street and driven to an abandoned, rat-ridden book depository in the wrecked inner city, where his charge is to explain by candlelight how German critical theory can help fix Detroit. Trevor ingeniously stretches the thin filament of this conceit, and by the end it's become a surprising and even poignant small-scale novel of ideas featuring two formidable characters: the resurgent Colin and his charismatic abductor, a drug dealer–turned-philosopher named Ty.
Well-made, erudite, often witty short stories from an accomplished veteran of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9848245-5-7
Page Count: 267
Publisher: SixOneSeven Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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