Merits comparison with the understated artistry of William Trevor or Graham Swift.
Stellar collection combines a sharp eye for detail, subtle character development and virtuosic command of narrative voice.
A British native who now lives in upstate New York, Lasdun (Seven Lies, 2006, etc.) also writes poetry, novels and screenplays, but his fourth volume of stories suggests that his strength lies in the short form. The title piece is the shortest, less than two-and-a-half pages, and functions as the prose equivalent of haiku in its evocation of an affair, a death and a marriage that is all but dead. Yet that same title could apply to practically every one of these stories, which often detail a pivotal point at which a man (usually) comes to terms with his essential character and discovers something hurtful or troubling about himself. In “An Anxious Man” (most of the titles are far more generic than the stories themselves), an inheritance disrupts a family’s equilibrium, as the wife’s attempts to play the stock market during an economic downturn make the husband fearful of everything, even as he questions his judgment. “Was it possible to change?” asks the protagonist of “The Natural Order,” a faithful husband whose trip with an incorrigible womanizer leaves him both appalled and envious. In “Cleanness,” a widower’s marriage to a much younger woman forces his son to confront his own indelible impurities. “A Bourgeois Story” explores “the peculiar economy of…conscience,” as an unexpected reunion of college friends, one of whom has become a well-to-do lawyer while the other has turned increasingly radical, leaves the former as uncomfortable with his own life as he is with his one-time friend. Chance encounters and unlikely connections prove particularly revelatory throughout. The piece that is least like the others, “Annals of the Honorary Secretary,” provides a mysterious parable of art that concludes, “Like most lyric gifts, it was short-lived. On the other hand, the critical exegesis has only just begun.”
Merits comparison with the understated artistry of William Trevor or Graham Swift.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-29902-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
From veteran Friedman—prolific short-fiction writer and novelist (Let's Hear It for a Beautiful Guy, The Current Climate, etc.), as well as playwright and screenwriter—comes this collection of 40-plus disparate and darkly humorous tales. Included are the never-before-published ``The Gentle Revolutionaries'' and ``Age Before Beauty,'' along with the previously uncollected ``Icing on the Cake'' and ``The Gent,'' both serialized in Playboy, and ``Pitched Out,'' which first appeared in Esquire. Friedman's manly, controlled fiction belies an absurd black humor straining to run amok, with subjects ranging from hopped-up teens to Air Force flyers, from whores and gamblers to death-row culinary experts, and aging family men. Cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and just plain silly, Friedman's short fiction is all over the map. As Kirkus said in 1962 of Black Angels: ``Mr. Friedman can play it black, cool, sick, gimmicky, profound. And he does it all . . . in spades.'' A welcome, hefty collection of an American original's finest writing.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-462-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
A poet's playful prose miscellany. Heyen (Crazy Horse in Stillness, etc.; English/State Univ. of New York, Brockport) is a contemporary Whitmanian, inclined to look for rapture in the mysteries of hogs, grubs, sycamores, and silver maples. As with Walt Whitman, too, Heyen's sense of humor helps to form what he sees: ``Not one grub is a bishop, mullah, or rabbi, so far as we know. . . . Not one is a rock star,'' he observes. But his sense of the droll is more wry and less loving than Whitman's. As someone who is living in a time of ecological decline (one of Heyen's preferred subjects, along with poetry), perhaps he can't afford to be expansively affirmative. His monologues, essays, diatribes, tales, and asides are at their best when he has chosen a very specific subject and has adopted a singular means of approach to it. One of the most striking and effective pieces, ``Tongues,'' leads Heyen to gather a swirling catalogue of facts and questions (Ö la Whitman) about the origins of tongue, the once popular meat derived from buffalo, whose population is now greatly diminished. Though succinct, the essay builds an uncanny momentum based on the drama of the writer's curiosity about the topic. We come to believe in his ecstatic respect for nature; in his conditional affection for human whims and his criticism of human error; and in his rage at unnecessary destruction of animal beauty. To mingle such different perspectives convincingly is no small success. But elsewhere, Heyen too often engages trivially with the trivial in arch and noncommittal prose mementos. His shrewd and delicate touch seems easily distracted, with the result that the range here is uneven. Still, how can one complain in good faith about a writer who would dub his first purchase of an ``Elvis on Velvet'' artwork with the moniker ``Synonym in Gauche''?
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 1-880238-56-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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