Half a century ago, Ralph Ellison was excited by the prodigious talent on display in this collection, and it can still...
Short stories reach across decades of racial upheaval and social transformation to reaffirm what remains human and vulnerable in all of us.
McPherson (1943-2016) was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, which he received for his 1977 collection of short stories, Elbow Room. Nine years earlier, the Savannah-born McPherson, who held degrees from both Harvard Law School and the University of Iowa (whose storied Writers Workshop he later directed), published this, his first and only other short-fiction collection. Upon reading this new edition, it somehow isn’t enough to say that the stories “hold up well.” Their blend of grittiness and sophistication, compassion and common sense, measured observation and melancholy humor can still profoundly move and illuminate. “Gold Coast”—which was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike—manages to compress whole contradictions of personality, ethnicity, and class into the seemingly discursive but poignant reminiscences of a young black janitor’s apprenticeship to his building’s embittered and elderly Irish superintendent. With similar incisiveness and sensitivity, the title novella dissects the vagaries of interracial romance. McPherson’s keen ear is perhaps most evident in “A Solo Song: For Doc,” which uses the irascible first-person voice of a 60-something Pullman waiter to recount the life of a similarly testy co-worker whose supreme competence and fierce dedication couldn’t protect him from bigotry or arbitrary dismissal. “Of Cabbages and Kings” evokes some of the darkly comedic paranoia of the 1960s while “An Act of Prostitution” puts the edgier comedy of the legal system up front. The collection remains an exemplar of humane, tough-minded grace while anticipating much of the trenchant, boundary-breaching fiction by young African-American writers emerging so far this century.
Half a century ago, Ralph Ellison was excited by the prodigious talent on display in this collection, and it can still galvanize contemporary readers.Pub Date: July 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-290973-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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