Many facets of life and love, each polished until it sparkles, in a gem of a collection that pulses with humanity and warmth.
Fourteen down-to-earth tales (all but one previously published), full of insight into how plain folks, families, and friends encounter disappointment and upheaval—and occasionally profound loss. A compassionate, rewarding first collection.
Gilliland’s (Being a Minor Writer, not reviewed) title story explores variations on the theme of longing—from a train conductor who observes a young working woman and her much older husband moving through stages from closeness to alienation; through an old man who allows himself to be run over by a train; and on to a young man who falls hard for his much older boss, a powerful figure in a Christian Science–like religion—but who loses her when the church has to sell its building and he loses his job as well. A maladjusted Vietnam vet, in “Purple Heart,” never far from his memories of the war, takes simple pleasure in talking with the Spanish cashier in the Circle K—until his routine takes on a different sense of déjà vu when he witnesses her in the act of being robbed. In “Witches,” a single mom moves with her daughter from Detroit to Albuquerque in order to get a fresh start: hitching a ride with a kind trucker, she gets settled in only to become unsettled again when a Navajo professor who’s befriended her begins to act as if she’s seeing a ghost. And in the understated and resonant tale “Permanence,” a survivor of young romance describes her heady relationship with a former high-school French teacher, a Stanford student, who woos her, drops her, and woos her again—even more intensely—only to reveal himself an utter, unabashed snob.
Many facets of life and love, each polished until it sparkles, in a gem of a collection that pulses with humanity and warmth.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-88748-362-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
What's most worthy in this hefty, three-part volume of still more Hemingway is that it contains (in its first section) all the stories that appeared together in the 1938 (and now out of print) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. After this, however, the pieces themselves and the grounds for their inclusion become more shaky. The second section includes stories that have been previously published but that haven't appeared in collections—including two segments (from 1934 and 1936) that later found their way into To Have and Have Not (1937) and the "story-within-a-story" that appeared in the recent The garden of Eden. Part three—frequently of more interest for Flemingway-voyeurs than for its self-evident merits—consists of previously unpublished work, including a lengthy outtake ("The Strange Country") from Islands in the Stream (1970), and two poor-to-middling Michigan stories (actually pieces, again, from an unfinished novel). Moments of interest, but luckiest are those who still have their copies of The First Forty-Nine.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1987
ISBN: 0684843323
Page Count: 666
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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