More entertaining, offbeat fiction from a proven master of domestic whimsy—author of eight novels and one other story collection (Women and Children First, 1988). Like a promising jazz invention, this 11-tale collection starts loose and cool with ``Talking Dog,'' in which a young woman tells how her dramatic older sister wielded undeserved emotional power over others, even after her death; then warms up with ``Cauliflower Heads,'' whose heroine, an American newlywed in Italy, acknowledges that her marriage to a radioactive-waste- disposal expert is a serious mistake; and hits its stride with ``Rubber Life,'' in which a library employee's obsession with a local artist turns to unexpected relief and laughter when a ghost- child ends the affair. As each of the remaining eight stories follows, Prose's intimate, confiding, subtly urgent narrative voice invites the reader ever deeper into the land of children's birthday parties, art museums, shopping malls, and outdoor weddings where her suburban-loner characters' sudden, quirky epiphanies take place. One of the best and most tightly honed tales is ``Amateur Voodoo,'' in which a son's search for his lost cat brings his parents together with his father's former lover for an uneasy cup of tea; in ``Potato World,'' even a teenager's phenomenally botched summer romance turns out to matter less than expected in the universal scheme of things; and in the final tale, ``Hansel and Gretel,'' Prose's delight in exposing the deadly sins that lurk beneath the surface of suburban ennui reaches its memorable peak. Prose—a master at maintaining a sense of the homogenized texture of American life while celebrating each individual's peculiar experience within it—works these tales of infidelity, envy, fear, and garden-variety confusion into a bright and memorable melody.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-23042-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991; Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories linked by their disagreeable narrator—a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference. But this eventually recovering slacker reveals in these deceptively thin tales a psyche so tormented and complex that we allow him his bleak redemption. Gobbling whatever drugs he can, the nameless narrator witnesses a fatal car wreck while hitchhiking and experiences a strange euphoria. His highs can be sharp, edgy, and intense, resulting in casual violence and emotional disconnectedness (``Dundun''); or sluggish, as he threatens to nod out before our eyes. At a local gin mill (``Out on Bail'') with his fellow losers, he ponders arbitrary fate among those who fancy themselves ``tragic'' and ``helpless.'' After shooting heroin with his girlfriend at a Holiday Inn, he finds his ``mother'' in an angelic barmaid (``Work''). There's plenty of drug-induced surrealism as well: a stranger, feigning muteness, hitches a ride (``Two Men''); a man walks into an emergency room with a knife stuck in his eye (``Emergency''); and a cruising salesman from Ohio pretends to be a Polish immigrant (``The Other Man''). In ``Dirty Wedding,'' the same narrator proves his cowardice and contemptibility while waiting for his girlfriend at an abortion clinic. ``Steady Hands at Seattle General'' transcribes a loopy, poetic dialogue in a detox ward, where the narrator meets someone more jaded and bruised than himself. In recovery, he works part-time at a Phoenix home for the old and hopeless—some so deformed ``they made God look like a senseless maniac.'' While there, he dates a dwarf, takes his Antabuse, and begins peeping on a Mennonite couple who live by his bus stop. All this to remind us that God shows up in all the wrong places, and angels are everywhere. Blunt and gritty: Johnson's beautifully damned stories sing with divine poetry, all the while bludgeoning us with existential reality.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17892-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short preface by Philip Young explains the raison d'etre of this presentation of the Nick Adams stories which here are arranged chronologically and therefore provide a continuity — from child to adolescent to soldier to writer — and reveal the character developmentally. There are eight new stories constituting 40% of the book and extending its interest as unpublished rather than merely republished Hemingway.
Pub Date: April 17, 1972
ISBN: 0684169401
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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