Squalor galore, for those who enjoy it.
The travails of a poor Florida family, chronicled in a debut collection of interconnected stories.
Buck Jackson, a vicious, womanizing alcoholic, beats his cringing wife Mary Carolyn (MC) while their 12-year-old daughter Georgia and her younger brother Sid cower under the coffeetable. Besides watching their parents fight, these unlovely brats have few amusements other than swimming and picking their scabs, which they munch potato-chip style. After brutal Buck threatens to leave MC on the grounds that she’s no fun anymore, Sid tries to distract him by hanging from the balcony of their 23rd-floor condo. Buck yanks him back but not before MC drives the family car into the ocean. It’s clear that this marriage can’t be saved. Still, life goes on. Georgia’s growing up fast, and she attempts to satisfy her burgeoning sexual curiosity by rubbing up half-naked against her drunken father. He rebuffs her, and MC flees with both children, even though she claims she doesn’t want a divorce. Georgia decides to live with Buck—a lowlife idyll that ends when her mother catches her watching porno movies with her loathsome dad and his repellent pals. Georgia continues to amuse herself by attracting and rejecting every red-blooded cracker within sniffing distance, including Oscar Love, a teenaged Lothario with a port-wine facial birthmark in the shape of Florida (the author is nothing if not loyal to her native state). Buck continues to drink, and smashes up a big ol’ car while carousing with his equally disgusting brothers. But colon cancer stops him in his tracks, and Georgia crashes his Olds in turn, upset when he enters the hospital for surgery. The grieving girl, now 15, consoles herself with a little meaningless sex with a scrawny construction worker. . . .
Squalor galore, for those who enjoy it.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-889330-56-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
In Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid (the Flo and Rose stories), Canadian short-story writer Munro drew unusual strength and sharpness from the vivid particulars of growing-up with—and growing out from—a stifling yet intense Canadian background. Here, though a few of these eleven new stories reach back to that core material effectively, the focus is looser, the specifics are less arresting, and Munro's alter-egos have moved on to a real yet not-always-compelling dilemma: over 40, long-divorced, children grown, these women waver "on the edge of caring and not caring"—about men, love, sex. In "Dulse," an editor/poet vacations alone, away from a troubled affair—and is confronted by sensuality on the one hand and the "lovely, durable shelter" of celibate retreat on the other. Two other stories feature the hurt and compromise involved in "casual" affairs—casual for the man, perhaps, less so for the woman. And in "Labor Day Dinner," the divorced woman is trying again, but with a sometimes-cruel man ("Your armpits are flabby," he says) whose love must be periodically revived by her displays of (unfeigned) indifference. Still, if these studies of to-care-or-not-to-care uneasiness lack the vigor of earlier Munro (at their weakest they're reminiscent of Alice Adams), a few other pieces are reassuringly full-blooded: "The Turkey Season," about a teenage girl who takes a part-time job as a turkey-gutter and learns some thorny first lessons about unrequited love; the title story, in which a woman's trip to the planetarium illuminates her turmoil (a dying father, a rejecting daughter) with metaphor; wonderful, resonant reminiscences about the contrasting spinsters on both sides of a family. And Munro's versatility is on display in other variations on the caring/not-caring tension—between two aging brothers, between two octogenarians in a nursing-home. Only one story here, in fact, is second-rate ("Accident," an unshapely parable of adultery, guilt, and Fate); Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout. But the special passion and unique territory of her previous collections are only intermittently evident here—making this something of a let-down for Munro admirers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0679732705
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
IN THE NEWS
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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