A bit uneven, then, but strong debut. One hopes Stuckey-French will soon test her gift for exploring arrestingly...
A provocative debut collection of 12 edgy, effectively varied tales, many set in what appears to be their author’s home state of Indiana.
Rigorous understatement is Stuckey-French’s game, and the few comparatively flat stories here either don't move far enough away from their ho-hum premises or don’t develop potentially intriguing situations. Respective examples are “Blessing,” in which a middle-aged father’s outing with his college-student son only hints at the ironies of age offering reassurances, if not certainties, to youth; and “Scavenger Hunt,” an overattenuated black comedy that implicitly compares a long-divorced woman’s neurotic instability to both the title game and TV’s lowbrow mock-documentary Unsolved Mysteries. The searching “Electric Wizard” builds a contrast between a poetry teacher’s relationship with her two young daughters and the bereaved couple—parents of a student who has killed himself—who importune her for proof “that his suicidal behavior arose from sheer genius.” But it feels like a half-finished version of a longer, more detailed story. A comparable thickness of conception and implication appears in several pieces, and works best in “Junior,” a carefully controlled portrayal of a moody juvenile misfit who’s initially attracted to, then discouraged by, her extended family’s eccentricity and needfulness; “The Visible Man,” in which a widow passively resigned to life in an old age home finds opportunities for mischief and a kind of control in her “friendship” with her suggestible former employer; and the superb “Search and Rescue”: a wonderfully imagined story, developed in an unusual and very moving way, that skillfully charts the tensions between two very different office co-workers: a volunteer scuba driver dedicated to retrieving drowning victims, and a lonely younger woman chained to the family demands imposed by her father, a helpless Alzheimer’s victim.
A bit uneven, then, but strong debut. One hopes Stuckey-French will soon test her gift for exploring arrestingly unconventional characters and conflicts in the ampler latitudes of the novel.Pub Date: May 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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