You have to play the hand you’re dealt, these bitter fictions imply. And Cox's worst-case scenarios read just like that:...
Three-time novelist Cox (Night Talk, 1997, etc.) offers 13 stories with familiar Southern Gothic topics—child abuse, brain damage, race relations, absent fathers, fate, and free will—but her undistinguished prose adds little to the litanies of woe.
One particularly unconvincing piece, “Old Court,” set in Mississippi after the Civil War, finds a widowed mother and her teenaged son defending their remote farm from drunken intruders. Though the father here died in an accident, the other men in these somber tales disappear for all sorts of reasons: the father in “Stolen” commits suicide, leaving his troubled son with only one friend, the local junk-dealer; “Biology” shows a 15-year-old whose father has left home transferring her need for affection to an itinerant preacher who seduces her before leaving town; Dad’s dead in “Washed,” and his widow’s warnings against men have no effect on their daughter, who falls heavily for a soldier stationed near town. On a happier note, “O Tannenbaum!” takes two kids whose parents are separating to spend Christmas with their uncle’s family, where they witness the true spirit of the holiday. However badly off some of Cox’s characters seem, her stories often suggest that things could be worse: two follow the sad lives of retarded boys, one loved by his long-suffering parents, the other protected by a kind doctor. At the extreme, in “The Third of July,” an unhappy housewife plans to run away from home until she comes across a horrible auto accident during her escape. Similarly, the young boy in the title story, whose parents are divorced, thinks his life stinks until he helps out a friend who lost his entire family in a car wreck. A particularly creepy tale, “The Last Fourth Grade,” intimates that its narrator in her youth actually encouraged the attentions of her teacher’s husband, a degenerate child-molester.
You have to play the hand you’re dealt, these bitter fictions imply. And Cox's worst-case scenarios read just like that: sententious life lessons with little art.Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46329-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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
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