A fine collection that amply demonstrates Appel’s gifts.
These eight short stories explore the author’s continuing preoccupation with secrets, lies, illusions, and the uncertainties of love.
“There are only two rules when it comes to manufacturing synthetics,” explains Silvio Sebastian Santino, an artificial foliage designer, to Laurie Jean, the 14-year-old narrator of “Bait and Switch.” Synthetic plants “have to look authentic and they have to be authentic,” in a kind of magic trick where appearance creates reality. In making convincing if biblically inauthentic fig leaves, Silvio emphasizes that carelessness is unacceptable, but “deception has its uses.” Deception, though, also has pitfalls; in the same tale, which opens this collection, Laurie Jean’s 48-year-old Aunt Jill—an “overweight kindergarten teacher”—keeps deluding herself about romantic possibilities with “handsome gay men in their thirties” or Silvio himself, 39 and ruggedly good-looking. Laurie Jean doesn’t actually want this job with Silvio; it’s part of Aunt Jill’s scheming. And Maia, Silvio’s stepsister who also works for him, has a ruse of her own, concealing “obscenities and symbols of the Antichrist” among foliage intended for a Christian theme park. When she ropes Laurie Jean into her subversion, the results allow Aunt Jill to blame her for ruining things with Silvio—which also lets her save face and move on. Deception has its uses, indeed. These ideas run throughout the volume; for example, in “The Summer of Interrogatory Subversion,” the narrator, an 18-year-old girl also named Maia, strikes up a relationship with her mother’s tenant, Jonah, a philosophy student 10 years older. He likes to pose difficult questions, then try to defend the answers, coolly considering (for example) whether disabled babies should be euthanized. With similar coolness, Jonah tells Maia she’ll want someone her own age, “and, to be blunt, so will I.” Bluntness is nearly always a disaster in Appel’s (The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street, 2017, etc.) stories; Maia’s hurt feelings and desire for closeness lead her to snoop in Jonah’s things. But despite his detachment, when Jonah finally feels betrayed by Maia, “the grief, the sheer bewilderment” on his face is, she says, “all the moral philosophy I ever needed to know.” The title and final story also considers blunt truths and how love can mediate them better than illusion. Ian, the narrator, a psychiatric emergency room doctor, starts getting patients who have begun blurting out confessions that end marriages and ruin reputations. Radio reports confirm that a recent rainstorm seems connected with “the unexpected sincerity that had swept across central Virginia.” Though Ian’s theory is mass hysteria, he avoids rain, worried he’ll tell his wife certain secrets. The final image suggests, though, with delicacy and sinew, the uses of truth in the service of love: “We would keep walking, from storm to storm, until we found a patch of honest rain.” In these tales, Appel can occasionally be overly obvious, as with the image of a medically locked-in man, unable to express himself, who represents “all of us.” Throughout, though, the author’s sense of comedy and forays into magical realism are welcome leaveners.
A fine collection that amply demonstrates Appel’s gifts.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-6255797-5-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Black Arrow Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
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