A smart, insightful collection of stories about life and love.
Levy’s award-winning short story collection masterfully explores the vagaries of romantic love.
In Levy’s (Amazons: A Love Story, 2012) 10 lyrical gems, disparate characters struggle without someone to love, and some are paralyzed and shocked by the loss of affection. In “Theory of Transportation,” Thomas sleepwalks to a movie theater on the night of his lover’s death. In “The Best Way Not to Freeze,” a reclusive English professor, Katie, falls for Ben, a man of the world who teaches her how to portage a canoe in the wilderness, but after invigorating her life, he returns to his ex. Most of Levy’s stories are peopled with highly educated characters interested in highbrow subjects—Nietzsche, French Impressionism, Persian rugs. They can’t help intellectualizing the confusing whys and hows of love. For example, in “Theory of Enlightenment,” Gil leaves Renee, trading their discussions of botany and Mahler for yogic asanas and incense at a Buddhist retreat. “Sometimes one plus one can equal less than two,” Gil tells her. Levy’s prose is deeply philosophical and sometimes heady but never pompous. It depicts infidelity and loss yet avoids melancholy and sentimentality, as the characters often don’t have the expected reactions to difficulties—they are too cerebral for that. Levy beautifully explores the pitfalls of domestic life in “Gravity,” in which Richard attends his sister’s second wedding, as do his mother, father and father’s mistress. The bride is nearly inconsequential in this poignant vignette; instead, the story focuses on Richard, who evaluates his own relationship in light of his familial peculiarities. The final story, “Theory of Dramatic Action,” employs a second-person narrator, as if to finally address the reader directly; it’s also the only one bordering on edgy, as a dominatrix tempts the heroine. Levy’s taut prose, intelligence and emotional acuity penetrate nearly every sentence. Fans of Amy Bloom’s short stories are likely to enjoy Levy’s work. Readers will likely savor this collection, a 2011 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, for its intoxicating language and introspection.
A smart, insightful collection of stories about life and love.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0820343495
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.
Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.
Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits. The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention. Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans. “The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781803366265
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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