This year's Drue Heinz Awardwinner collects 15 stories, many of which have been published in literary magazines. Most of these elegantly written pieces concern privileged protagonists who eventually discover ``the harsh light of this world.'' Pearlman's doctors, professors, and patricians all must confront, in varying ways, the indignities of illness or old age. In the title story, a Holocaust survivor, now a prominent government minister in a Latin American country, ponders her future as the country undergoes violent political change. In ``The Cook,'' an American-born dwarf who cares for abandoned children in a repressive Latin country must confront the possibility that the government is using these kids to harvest organs. Less dramatically, the American Jewish grandfather in ``To Reach This Season'' travels to Central America to meet the young native boy his homosexual son is adopting. A fine quartet of related pieces focus on Donna, a genteel, ``drab Christian'' who runs a soup kitchen for women. We follow her courtship by Raphael, a Jewish psychiatrist who doesn't fully appreciate Donna's charitable impulses. Donna discovers her own ambiguous feelings about the poor in ``Dorothea,'' but eventually she and Raphael (who's come to value Donna's work) hold their wedding at the soup kitchen. The elderly historian in ``Cavalier'' will not go gentle into that good night, until a female attendant encourages him to tell her stories based on his area of expertise. The retired schoolteacher in ``Settlers,'' who lives on the edges of other people's lives, finds his happy old age harshly altered. While a young doctor recuperates on Cape Cold from cancer in ``The Noncombatant,'' he must deal with the exuberance of all around him as WW II comes to an end. Clearly, the play of conflicting passions animates Pearlman's fictive imagination. And two fabulistic pieces—one about a professional letter writer—further testify to her belief in redemptive art. A solid debut from a writer worth keeping an eye on.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-8229-3962-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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