As funny as it is, Singleton’s humor has a sharp edge, and his episodic account of life in the hinterlands is as poignant as...
Fourteen interconnected stories depict the strange and ineluctable process by which an odd teenager grows into a semi-serious young man.
Singleton’s (The Half-Mammals of Dixie, 2002) tales of the South are baroque enough to make Flannery O’Connor look like a Puritan—for, in the author’s eyes, South Carolina (his home state) is a phantasmagoria of dreamers, cranks, charlatans, rogues, and simple homegrown loonies. We see the world here through the eyes of Mendal Dawes, a hapless 15-year-old growing up in the small town of Forty-Five in the 1970s. Mendal’s father Lee—who buries fake barrels of toxic waste in his backyard, thinking it’ll deter property development—would probably be considered an oddball in Woodstock or the East Village, let alone Middle America. In Forty-Five, he’s not even an eccentric. This is a town where Mendal’s Little League coach (a mill worker with a penchant for self-inflicted wounds) has only one finger on his pitching hand—which may explain why the team has a record of losses rivaling the old Washington Senators or the earliest years of the Mets. Mendal naturally takes the world he was born into for granted, but there are times when he begins to wonder what he’s doing here—like when he concludes that Lee murdered his mother, or when the village idiot assaults him for working on a Sunday. Sensitive, intelligent, and fairly well-read (his father makes him recite passages from Durkheim or Marx before dinner each night), Mendal is not cut out for life in Forty-Five, where segregation is still a de facto reality and the students sell marijuana to their teachers. But what good is it to know about the larger world if you can’t get to it?
As funny as it is, Singleton’s humor has a sharp edge, and his episodic account of life in the hinterlands is as poignant as it is outrageous.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-404-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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