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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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