This second collection by the author of The Garden State (1988) gathers 13 slick but formulaic stories, half of which have appeared in small magazines. Krist profiles a number of suburban misfits in these fictions, three of which chronicle a teenaged boy's view of his parents' crumbling marriage. His mother suffers a miscarriage (``Ghost Story''); grows increasingly erratic until she finds fulfilling work in a zoo (``Giant Step''); and flirts with a handsome college boy while summering without dad on the Jersey shore (``Numbers''). More flighty women people stories about an indexer separated from her philandering husband (the title story); a lesbian college administrator who can't adjust to separation from her lover (``Safe Houses''); and a mysterious woman named Alice who appears from nowhere in a man's life and disappears just as mysteriously (``Ever Alice''). Men fare no better in Krist's tales of failed relationships—certainly not the young man leaving a girlfriend who suffers from MS in ``Baggage,'' nor the divorced dad whose daughter doesn't want to see him in ``Eclipse.'' The real oddballs here provide some comic relief: there's the young embalmer, the son of a former call girl, who wants to leave Westchester County for the freedom of Alaska (``Hungry''); the elderly, left-wing homosexual photographer who refuses to acknowledge his diminished capacities even to his sympathetic bisexual nephew (``Uncle Issac''); and the truly oafish young man who lives with his widowed mother in Brooklyn, and who's flabbergasted by her pregnancy and impending marriage (``Unique Szechuan II''). No story stands out in this calculated collection of contemporary goofiness. Sharp dialogue and an economic style can't compensate for utter predictability.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-182064-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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