Lish, with his ups and downs, is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!
After such great Lish novels as Epigraph (1996) and Arcade, or How to Write a Novel (1998), a volume of mere stories can seem slight stuff; but moments here, even so, place Lish among the top few still writing what once was called `serious` literature.
The tiny `Facts of Steel` sets out a poetics, announcing that `Nothing would please me more than for me as an artist to be free to sit here and tell you the truth. But they won't let me do it.` Who `they` is may puzzle some while confirming for others that in mass-culture `truth` is increasingly a taboo—which is why, says Lish, `I have no choice but to resort to ruse after ruse. God knows I get no pleasure from it . . . . But am I the one who has the say?` And the `ruses` here when brilliant are brilliant indeed, though when meager, meager with a vengeance. `Ground` recollects childhood in a way so tedious (a boy pretends his two fingers are a walking man) that it refuses to be interesting, except possibly for the author (and not even that for sure); the same goes, say, for the overreaching of `The Positions,` a teeny tale whose speaker claims that `the best thing in my life` has been pulling lint from under the clothes dryer. On the other hand, the simple buying of a new window shade, in `Physis versus Nomos,` captivates with sheer smartness and drollery, while `Man on the Go,` about a widower and a misbehaving washing machine, gets a perfect ten for laugh-out-loud funny. The travel-tale `Among the Pomeranians` may be slow, but so what when `How the Sophist Got Spotted,` for example, is a true Beckettian tour de force, or when `Mercantilism` wraps up whole lives and entire eras in a brilliance of wit, woe, and words.
Lish, with his ups and downs, is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!Pub Date: May 13, 2000
ISBN: 1-56858-154-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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