Occasionally stilted but often luminous literary studies in which life imitates art.
Artistic works of the old masters illuminate stories of crime, family feuds, and acrid relationships in Barasch Rubinstein’s knotty stories.
The author prefaces each of these four tales with brief, scholarly pieces about Italian Renaissance artists, each hinting at the following story’s themes. In “On Perspective,” 14th-century painter Giotto’s innovations in perspective frame a narrative about a restaurant owner who hires a prisoner on work-release and is excited by the man’s accounts of his burglaries—until some money goes missing. “On Motion” pairs Leonardo da Vinci’s treatment of movement with a couple traveling around the world by train and plane, stewing in jealousy and the man’s resentment at being left out of his father’s will. “On Time” cites Michelangelo’s works to comment on a woman’s reconnection with an old flame who dredges up anguished recollections of her abortion and their breakup. “On Synthesis” moves from Raphael’s harmonious balancing of motifs to a woman whose sense of empathy sharpens as she writes a story about a painter and advises people on their conflicting desires for love and meaning. Barasch Rubinstein’s lucid, engaging art-history sections, which are illustrated by color reproductions of various masterpieces, establish an intellectual tone that bleeds into her fiction as her characters self-consciously brood over moral and epistemic conundrums. There’s much neurotic navel-gazing in the stories, and characters tend to sound like psychiatrists when they speak, as when the narrator of “On Synthesis” says, “Your search for the truth is a result of your curiosity. The child that didn’t want to find out what his father was doing preferred not to delve into human nature.” Fortunately, Barasch Rubinstein excels at visual, painterly imagery that opens up her characters’ inner worlds, as in “On Time”: “A hidden joy was forming, splashing golden slivers everywhere, illuminating the suffering, making it look almost attractive.” The result is a gallery of shrewdly drawn, deeply felt portraits.
Occasionally stilted but often luminous literary studies in which life imitates art.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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