Tales that are emotional and intellectual but almost always moving; a superb collection.
A debut volume of short stories captures small slices of characters’ lives.
Most of the tales in this collection focus on brief incidents, like an EMT, new on the job, watching police deal with a deer struck by his ambulance or a kid trying to run home after getting caught stealing beer. Arias makes a strong impression with his stories, many of which have been previously published in journals and magazines. The time elapsed in a tale might be less than an hour, but he expertly reveals something particular about his characters and hints at something universal. This is obvious from the first story, “Deer Don’t Scream, Do They?” The inexperienced EMT is standing by the side of the road with a couple of cops and the ambulance driver as a deer lies dying on the road. If the animal were a person, the EMT would be helping the injured party. But he can’t, and neither, apparently, can the rookie cop, who makes a mess of trying to put the deer down. In the end, no matter what they do, they all have to move on to the next moment, the next sufferer. Some of the tales are gritty like that one, while others are more esoteric, such as “The Case for Viable Life in Atlantis,” which sets out opening and closing arguments and exhibits to prove that people should be able to breathe underwater. The central metaphor here gets a bit cloudy. Arias’ work is much more striking when he grounds it in more visceral events, no matter how strange the subject matter. In “Closer,” a man who recently lost his wife to illness finds himself drawn to crowds and contact and doesn’t break down to properly mourn until he is rejected after an awkward bathroom encounter. In “Writing Code,” a nerdy kid tries to come out of his shell by hanging mistletoe from trees and overhead wires on the route his crush walks to school. The author sets up the story from a “his and hers” perspective, which not only gives readers a look inside both characters, but also provides a heartbreaking twist.
Tales that are emotional and intellectual but almost always moving; a superb collection.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980116-5-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Black Bomb Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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