A strong appetite for Southern shtick (if not for gruel itself) might enhance readers’ appreciation for the down-home whimsy...
From South Carolina writer Singleton (Novel, 2005, etc.), a collection of 19 reprinted stories, some of them suffering from a slight case of the cutes.
The fictional hamlet of Gruel is one of those towns that time forgot, though it attempts various scams to attract tourists and boasts Victorian houses that speculators can buy for about five percent of what they would cost elsewhere. While some characters reappear from one story to another and keep showing up at the same old places, particularly Gruel BBQ and Roughhouse Billiards, there’s a surprising amount of mobility in this South Carolina town. Strangers find themselves drawn here for inexplicable reasons (or Victorian houses), while natives who left and vowed never to return somehow make their way back. Many of the characters have more education than the stereotypical small-town rube; a surprising number either work or have worked in academe (Singleton is a writing teacher). Thus, for every story like “Runt,” which depicts Sister the Wonder Dog and her record-setting litter of 24, there’s one like “The Novels of Raymond Carver,” which involves a made-up course on the noted short-story writer’s made-up book-length fiction. The guy who sells gas masks as the perfect Valentine’s Day present to protect the one you love in “Snipers” is balanced by the heart-attack victim who cuts a swathe through his neighbors’ backyards on a power lawnmower in “John Cheever, Rest in Peace,” a sardonic riff on “The Swimmer.” Perhaps the best story here is “Soldiers in Gruel,” which features an overeducated Northern woman who brings her brand of conceptual art to the annual car show and finds a deeper meaning than her schooling could ever have provided.
A strong appetite for Southern shtick (if not for gruel itself) might enhance readers’ appreciation for the down-home whimsy of these tales.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-603061-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes—in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator—who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that "things around [him] have lost their balance," that a "pragmatic approach" helps avoid complicated problems—is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper. In another notable story, "Sleep," a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean "being eternally awake and staring into darkness." Stories like "TV People," in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who "look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated"; "Barn Burning," in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and "The Second Bakery Attack," in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a "weird presence" in their lives—all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning.
Pub Date: March 31, 1993
ISBN: 0679750533
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Warm, generous stories.
A kind and earnest debut collection of connected stories set in blue-collar northeastern Pennsylvania.
MK and Colleen, former classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, reconnect as middle-aged women, both working retail jobs in a mall that’s just months away from closing its doors. From the outside, they seem to live just on the edge of despair and economic ruin, except both have too much moxie. In "St. Christopher on Pluto," for example, Colleen entangles MK in a plot to ditch Colleen's car by the Susquehanna River for insurance money. While MK lectures Colleen on committing fraud, Colleen wisecracks and tells MK to lighten up. That's the setup of many of McKinley's stories: Bighearted, redheaded Colleen has a scheme (or a volunteer gig), and she wheedles practical MK, often the narrator, into coming along. These slice-of-life stories touch upon social issues on the verge of fracturing already economically stressed, conservative communities: immigration, America's never-ending post–9/11 wars, the HIV epidemic, drug addiction, and the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. In "Complicado," Colleen volunteers to photograph an ESL class graduation, but it turns out the women don't want their pictures taken for fear of becoming the target of a rising tide of jingoism. Once she understands, Colleen yanks the film from her camera, and the party ends with the church organist's offering her accordion to a young Mexican man, "the Latin sounds creat[ing] fusion in a room steeped with polka fests." While we yearn for such happy endings in life, they can seem a bit treacly in fiction. When McKinley resists the lure of “Kumbayah” moments, she delivers emotionally devastating stories about how places with bleak economic futures hurt good, ordinary people—as well as how such people quietly craft lives full of intangible bounty.
Warm, generous stories.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949199-26-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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