Dead-on dialogue, realistically drawn scenes of extreme psychological discomfort, a subtle use of metaphor, and bursts of...
A hard-hitting debut collection of mostly first-person narratives about the often-disappointing romantic entanglements of women in their 20s and early 30s.
The gimmick here is initially confusing: each story is preceded by an epigraph from saucy Mae West ("It's not the men in your life that counts—it's the life in your men," etc.); this device, combined with the fact that the stories are narrated by characters who sound a lot alike, suggests that they're interconnected even when they're not. Nonetheless, the collection sings. Krouse, who has had short fiction published in the Atlantic Monthly, is a masterful and elegant storyteller, and these tales are filled with narrative and stylistic surprises. "Drugs and You" begins with an anecdote about the narrator's boyfriend, quickly interrupted by a dramatic, Meghan Daum–like aside: "This story is about drugs. I'm telling you because I was surprised, too." The perfect boyfriend, it turns out, is a junkie, and the piece details the downfall of the perfect relationship. In the deliciously catty "Other People's Mothers," the narrator recounts her relationships with her friends' and boyfriends' mothers, finally explaining—with no unnecessary drama—her repulsion from her own mother, a nasty specimen who torments the narrator's blind, senile grandmother. "The Husbands" turns what could be a clichéd situation—a woman who, in her own words, "like[s] to sleep with other women's husbands"—into an exquisite anatomy of self-loathing and the destructive behavior that results from it. Virtually all these stories, in fact, explore the nature of compulsion, as in "No Universe," in which the narrator watches her friend Mona, racked with guilt after an abortion, start a family with a man she doesn't love. The bombastic style and unflinching honesty of the whole collection is reminiscent of Elissa Schappell and Emily Carter.
Dead-on dialogue, realistically drawn scenes of extreme psychological discomfort, a subtle use of metaphor, and bursts of lyric epiphany: an irresistible debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0244-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Whether you were with it or not, Pynchon's first novel V. had some prodigally exciting sequences to startle the most phlegmatic imagination. Here, however, his narrative verve has shrivelled into sheer bizarrerie. So much of it is not only unidentifiable but also unintelligible— it's not to be read as much as deciphered. The third chapter opens with "Things then did not delay in turning curious" but it has been prefaced with all kinds of Happenings after Mrs. Oedipa Maas leaves her husband Mucho. He's a disc jockey spooked by his dream of the car lot where he had once worked. She spends a night with a lawyer in a motel, playing Strip Botticelli in front of the tube. And from then on Oedipa's search, in fluid drive up and down the freeways, to the Yoyodyne electronics factory in San Narciso, into a strange society called The Tristero and for the answer to a reappearing symbol— W.A.S.T.E., back to her psychiatrist Dr. Hilarius, and to Mucho who now knows the answer to the "crying" of the lot (it's N.A.D.A.)— oh well, this is all a dizzying exposure to what is presumably a satire of contemporary society and its fluor-essence, Southern California... Pynchon's accessories include names (Driblette; Koteks; Genghis Cohen); props (feeding "eggplant sandwiches to not too bright seagulls"); insets (a long Jacobean play) and in jokes... HELP! Even the Beatles can't and they suggest the singing group called the Paranoids. Somehow it seems as if a genuine talent had reduced itself to automated kookiness. Hip, yes; hooray, no.
Pub Date: April 27, 1966
ISBN: 006091307X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1966
PERSPECTIVES
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.
A wine expert in training visits her family’s vineyard in Burgundy only to discover a cellar full of secrets.
Kate Elliott, a San Francisco sommelier and daughter of a French expatriate, is preparing for a notoriously difficult wine-tasting exam. If she passes (most don’t), she will be one of a tiny cadre of certified Masters of Wine worldwide. She has repeatedly flunked the test; her weakness is French whites, so some serious cramming at Domaine Charpin, her ancestral vineyard, is in order. There, Kate rejoins Heather, her best friend from college, who married her cousin Nico, the Domaine’s current vintner. Kate herself almost wed a vigneron, Nico’s neighbor Jean-Luc, but feared being trapped in domesticity. Decluttering the family caves, Kate and Heather discover the World War II–era effects of one Hélène Charpin—her great half-aunt, Kate learns. Why, then, do the Charpins, particularly dour Uncle Philippe, seem determined to excise Hélène from family memory? Interspersed with Kate’s first-person narration are excerpts from Hélène’s wartime diary, which her descendants have yet to find. A budding chemist whose university plans were dashed by the German invasion of France, Hélène and her best friend, Rose, who is Jewish, are recruited by the Resistance. Hélène’s father, Edouard, is also a Résistant, unbeknownst to her stepmother, who embraces the new status quo. In the present, the little Kate is able to glean from the historical archives reveals that Hélène was punished as a collaborator, one of the women whose heads were shaved, post-Occupation, as a badge of shame. An extensive subplot, concerning a hidden wine cache and another sommelier’s duplicity, adds little, whereas the central question—what is up with the Charpins?—is sadly underdeveloped. The apparent estrangement not only between the Charpins and Philippe’s sister Céline, Kate’s mother, but between mother and daughter remains unexplored. Wine buffs will enjoy the detailed descriptions of viticulture and the sommelier’s art. Mah deserves credit at least for raising a still-taboo subject—the barbaric and unjust treatment of accused female collaborators after the Allied liberation of France.
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-282331-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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