Characters seldom transcend their class, race, or gender in a pretentious collection of six stories and a novella, winner of Pushcart's 14th annual Editors' Book Award, by Trinity College (Conn.) English professor Pfeil. Politics is mostly gesture in these jargony tales of disappointment and unrealized desire. Lost innocence seems to be the point of ``A Buffalo, New York Story,'' the narrator's lament over the Cold War values he wholeheartedly embraced in his middle- class youth: Quotations from Life magazine provide the historical context to this tale of left-liberal guilt. Race is at the center of the pointless ``Gator,'' a reminiscence of the narrator's short friendship with a black man during his own hippie years; his present-day success as a Stanford MBA of course explains his implicit racism. Male sexual (hetero) guilt underpins ``Dirty Pieces,'' a typically puritanical bit of leftish angst over masturbation, horniness, and lustful thoughts about women. The link between politics and sex is further explored in ``The Angel of Dad,'' the story of Max the Rad, an aging (and unintentional) caricature of a New Leftover who decides to change his life when his father's ghost visits him. The joyful innocence of teens who spontaneously rediscover do-wop singing is undercut by their commercial exploitation—a TV ad that becomes their 15 minutes. The Ann Beattieish novella, ``Almost Like Falling,'' captures the sad lives of some '60s types who realize, in the '80s, that their lives are going nowhere, Reagan being partly to blame for their working- class miseries. ``Freeway Bypass'' is the most explicit political piece here, with supporting quotations from Marx and Fredric Jameson: It's a collage of voices—anarchists who deface billboards; an old-timer disgusted by their vandalism; a billboard- space salesman; and a South American refugee who survives for days on a highway divider after being hit by a car. Humorless tales, in all, from a tenured radical.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-49-9
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
In Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid (the Flo and Rose stories), Canadian short-story writer Munro drew unusual strength and sharpness from the vivid particulars of growing-up with—and growing out from—a stifling yet intense Canadian background. Here, though a few of these eleven new stories reach back to that core material effectively, the focus is looser, the specifics are less arresting, and Munro's alter-egos have moved on to a real yet not-always-compelling dilemma: over 40, long-divorced, children grown, these women waver "on the edge of caring and not caring"—about men, love, sex. In "Dulse," an editor/poet vacations alone, away from a troubled affair—and is confronted by sensuality on the one hand and the "lovely, durable shelter" of celibate retreat on the other. Two other stories feature the hurt and compromise involved in "casual" affairs—casual for the man, perhaps, less so for the woman. And in "Labor Day Dinner," the divorced woman is trying again, but with a sometimes-cruel man ("Your armpits are flabby," he says) whose love must be periodically revived by her displays of (unfeigned) indifference. Still, if these studies of to-care-or-not-to-care uneasiness lack the vigor of earlier Munro (at their weakest they're reminiscent of Alice Adams), a few other pieces are reassuringly full-blooded: "The Turkey Season," about a teenage girl who takes a part-time job as a turkey-gutter and learns some thorny first lessons about unrequited love; the title story, in which a woman's trip to the planetarium illuminates her turmoil (a dying father, a rejecting daughter) with metaphor; wonderful, resonant reminiscences about the contrasting spinsters on both sides of a family. And Munro's versatility is on display in other variations on the caring/not-caring tension—between two aging brothers, between two octogenarians in a nursing-home. Only one story here, in fact, is second-rate ("Accident," an unshapely parable of adultery, guilt, and Fate); Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout. But the special passion and unique territory of her previous collections are only intermittently evident here—making this something of a let-down for Munro admirers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0679732705
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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