Without fundamentally challenging the traditional short story structure, the author finds a way to bend it to suit a skewed...
The nine stories in this collection by Puchner (Model Home, 2010, etc.) range from the domestic to the surreal.
Even the most seemingly realistic of them, however, hint at cracks under the surface of normal life in the suburban United States. Puchner often casts an eye on the sheer strangeness of aging, whether it’s during the sudden onslaught of puberty or the slow decline from middle age onward. "Right This Instant" compresses all the agonies of adolescence into a single turning point, as confused Josh—missing his father, hating the guy who has replaced him, and newly introduced to a potent strain of marijuana by an older kid down the street—suddenly convinces himself that his mom is a robot. The oddest, and possibly the strongest, story in the volume takes this theme to its logical extreme. In "Beautiful Monsters," a boy and a girl, both “Perennials” whose aging has been delayed indefinitely at a pre-pubescent stage, are appalled and fascinated to encounter a “Senescent,” a grown man with a “strange hairy body and giant shoulders tucked in like a vulture’s.” The collection sometimes suffers from repetition of plots: an odd number of the stories, for example, hinge on crises that result when a caregiver puts a young child in radical danger. But they’re intriguingly varied in terms of characters and setting and particularly in tone. Puchner can be wildly funny, as in "Trojan Whores Hate You Back," a mordant tale of a would-be comeback tour by a punk band whose members now use hemorrhoid pillows and wear windbreakers and blue linen shorts. Or oddly touching, as in "Mothership," in which a self-involved young woman recently released from drug treatment takes her niece and nephew trick-or-treating, to mixed results.
Without fundamentally challenging the traditional short story structure, the author finds a way to bend it to suit a skewed and fantastic vision of the world.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4780-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
