One of the masters displays his wares, to stunning effect.
Matchless narrative economy and surgically precise prose are the identifying marks of this exemplary gathering: ten stories by the semi-legendary veteran author (Burning the Days, 1997, etc.)
Sex, betrayal, aging and death are dominant themes, whether in a night of shared palaver among manless “girl” friends that ends in a plaintive cry for attention (“Such Fun”); a vignette showing a charismatic, unstable male friend’s effect on a complacent marriage (“Give”); or the tale (“Bangkok”) of a married bookseller’s resistance to the promiscuous former lover who challenges him to choose between “Life and a kind of pretend life.” Salter’s great gift is his ability to trace the arc of an entire life, or several shared or separated lives, with a masterly fusion of crisp dialogue and penetrating summary statement. In “Comet,” for example, the future of a seemingly successful second marriage is adumbrated in the wife’s sardonic acknowledgement of her new husband’s history of infidelities. D.H. Lawrence might have devised the haunting symbolism that pervades “My Lord You,” in which an unhappy wife’s fixation on a self-destructive poet is crystallized in the figure of his enormous dog, which follows her silently (“its shoulders moving smoothly, like a kind of machine”). Elsewhere, a heartless, calculating “party girl” is “handled” (in “Platinum”) by the wealthy lawyer who shares her with his errant-son-in-law (it reads like a combination of Edith Wharton and John O’Hara). The grief felt by a stockbroker too timid to seize the happiness offered him is depicted in “Palm Court,” and a career army man’s victimization by his selfish Czech wife, and eventual escape from her spell into the consolations of tradition and responsibility, is etched in seven icy pages in “Arlington.” All Salter’s themes merge memorably in the concluding (title) story, a compact symphony of mutual devotion, human frailty and lingering regret.
One of the masters displays his wares, to stunning effect.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4312-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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