One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive...
Seventeen stories by the Irish-born Canadian author (Slammerkin, 2001, etc.) ransack what Donoghue calls “the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life” for razor-sharp vignettes of the fates of women in judgmental male-dominated societies.
The volume gets off to a flying start with “The Last Rabbit,” in which a duplicitous “man-midwife” persuades a poor countrywoman to claim she has experienced a miraculous birthing. It’s a tale inspired by a famous Hogarth engraving—as Donoghue explains in the first of the “Note(s)” (acknowledging sources) that follow each story. Next up is the nicely titled “Acts of Union,” about a drunken English soldier serving in Ireland who’s hoodwinked into marrying a wily apothecary’s spinster niece. You’ll think of Boccaccio and Chaucer (as well as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood) as Donoghue ranges among the lives of eminent figures, focusing, for example, on asexual art historian John Ruskin’s ludicrous nuptial night (“Come, gentle Night”); feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft’s failed career as governess (“Words for Things”); and the infuriating Elmer Gantry–like hypocrite, apocalyptic preacher Elspeth “Luckie” Buchan (“Revelations”). Equally telling are stories of the obscure: the smallest surviving baby ever heard of, exhibited as a freak of nature (“A Short Story”); a plucky victim of the barbarous practice of clitoridectomy, undertaken to combat “the disease of self-irritation” (“Cured”); two learned ladies who live in scholarly seclusion on the Norfolk coast, pausing from their mental exertions to rescue drowning sailors (“Salvage”); and, in the remarkable “The Necessity of Burning,” invincibly ignorant Margery Starre, an illiterate beldame to turns lustily to book-burning during the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt against the intellectual tyranny of Cambridge University. These jewel-like stories vibrate with thickly textured detail and vigorous period language. Donoghue’s colorful, confrontational historically based fiction is making something entirely new and captivating out of gender issues.
One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive fictional territory.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100937-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
A debut collection of linked stories that provides a comprehensive history of a troubled American family. The Goodpastures are the sort of people often thought to be rich just because they—ve been around. Old-style Wasps, they—re actually quite modest in tastes and means. But there’s a fissure of unhappiness running through the family, and a trust fund is needed to break it open: when a shady Florida lawyer swindles them, Stuart Goodpasture goes down to Jacksonville to investigate—and falls in love with Muriel, a born-again Christian. She converts Stuart, who then divorces his wife, marries her, and patches together an elaborate scheme to invest the remainder of his children’s money in a new hospital wing at Oral Roberts University. His children—Stuart, Jr., Brian, Jay, and Moriah—feel betrayed, both by the divorce and the conversion, but they go along with the plan. Brian, Jay, and Moriah, all D.C. lawyers and lobbyists, are anyhow too wrapped up in their own dramas to explore their father’s. But Stuart, Jr., goes out to Oklahoma to do some ferreting—and finds that the odd hospital scheme is actually an even odder oil venture. Then he’s presented with evidence that makes him question his own paternity. Blood is thicker than water, perhaps, yet water’s thicker than air: it’s hard enough to stay loyal to your old man when your entire family hates him, he’s squandered your inheritance, and his second wife keeps praying for you in restaurants. But what if he’s not even your old man? That’s when you begin to wonder what family life is all about. Nicely drawn portraits that ring true, enclosed within a narrative that’s at times badly overwritten (—I was a humble cottage villager who carried in his rucksack daydreams of effortless and precocious success, and I was still trying then to make that quantum leap onto the staff of a senator—). Still, a good start.
Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-8018-6023-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Thirteen stories in a second collection, mainly set in Paraguay, by US diplomat and novelist Jacobs (A Cast of Spaniards, 1994; Stone Cowboy, 1997). Jacobs— mind seems divided on Paraguay, fascinated and horrified to an equal degree by its history, religion, and politics. The title story, for example, describes the life of one Arami Bedoya, a peasant taken from her parents as a child and raised in a secret —orphanage— maintained to provide the country’s President with a steady supply of young mistresses. After escaping her fate by running away, Arami is consumed by a lust for vengeance and plots an assassination. —Down in Paraguay— chronicles an American’s unhappy marriage to a local woman. The husband, discovering his wife’s infidelity, considers murdering her and her lover, then gives up on the idea—only to be urged on by his young son, who cannot bear the dishonor of his —bad— mother. The murderous obsession of an unhappily wedded army sergeant with a young actor dominates —The Ballad of Tony Nail,— while —Mengele Dies Again— portrays the Nazi physician’s last days in Paraguay. —The Rape of Reason— is told from the perspective of Martin del Valle, a Bolivian intellectual from a prominent family who’s raised in exile in the States but returns home to teach at the University of La Paz. Expelled from the university for his —reactionary— views, he becomes a journalist who’s later threatened for opposing the government in his writing. The best piece here,—Marina in the Key of Blue Flat,— offers a portrait of a young housemaid who works for well-to-do Paraguayans and contrasts her own life with the privileges and fears of theirs. Sometimes unfocused and rambling, but, still, these sensitive insider’s stories give a vivid glimpse of a country that may always come across as foreign.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-135-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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