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INFINITE ENDING

TEN STORIES

An uneven but frequently effective collection of stories about people seeking to understand themselves and their...

A collection of short stories and essays that lean heavily toward the postmodern.

Marcopolos (Almost Home, 2013, etc.) here offers 10 short stories, followed by two essays on the nature and history of the subgenre of postmodern literary fiction. Readers leery of postmodernism may want to read these essays first, in order to get the author’s perspective on the type of fiction he considers his stories to be. In general, readers approaching postmodern stories can expect less formal structure and more rhetorical game-playing than what they might get in the works of writers such as John Updike or John Cheever. Certainly, Marcopolos delivers on both those counts, as his stories are filled with narrative playfulness and, sometimes, conceptual strangeness. They offer a fairly wide variety of plots, although a common strand of personality investigation runs through most of them: “What drives you?” one character asks in the first story, “Tock,” and variations of that question appear in most of the following tales. As in any such collection, some entries are stronger than others. One standout is “Valhalla House,” in which Enzo, a college baseball player, is weakened by a recent elbow surgery; he can “feel the impact of losing everything,” including the loyalty of “all the people who loved him fifty pounds and a 95-mile-an-hour fastball ago.” Here, Marcopolos really captures the brutal realities of chancing everything on the possibility of a pro career. “Eroticoffica” is another strong entry, in which two young women take a break from their job writing pornographic e-books (“each cranking out many titles of hot-selling erotica each year”) in order to swap complaints and dreams; they go to an eccentric coffee shop, where their laughter inadvertently prompts another patron to go home and shoot himself. Despite the author’s essays on postmodernism, the best stories in this collection are the most traditional ones. There’s plenty here that Updike and Cheever fans will like, even if they’ve never given postmodernism a second glance.

An uneven but frequently effective collection of stories about people seeking to understand themselves and their predicaments.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0983459996

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Kykeon Media

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2015

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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