Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.
These well-observed short stories describe sometimes-uneasy, sometimes-hopeful reconciliations with fortune.
Most of the 24 short stories in this collection previously appeared in literary journals; some have been altered slightly for this publication. In the title story—which captures a mood underlying many in the collection—an unnamed couple’s road to marriage begins with adopting a pug and proceeds from there like some blandly idyllic TV montage: they walk the dog, name him Prince, and enjoy his excited jumping up and down; they get corporate jobs, plan a small wedding, and have the ceremony in a park gazebo. When disaster upends them, Prince has a new home, “but he would never jump up and down. Instead, he would…spend his every night at the door, waiting, unable to believe in fate.” Named or unnamed, male or female, young or old, the characters in these stories struggle more or less successfully to believe in their fates. Sometimes, as in “The Driver,” rhythms of marriage and friendship ease the process. Maggie accompanies her second husband, Frank—20 years her senior—to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where he fails a vision test. Afterward, they bicker on a safe topic—“I’ll be damned if I’m going to Bob Evans”—until “the discomfort of Frank’s new reality dissolved.” The car’s engine, like their marriage, settles, after an initial kick, “into a comfortable hum.” The stories are arranged well to bring similar themes together: parents, children, and siblings; addicts, criminals, and twelve-steppers; workplaces; disasters, natural and otherwise. In many passages, Knox (Don’t Tease the Elephants, 2014, etc.) displays a keen pithiness: the pug’s “bunched face,” an old man’s insight about the ruthlessness shared by CEOs and addicts: “You got the really out and out and the really up and up, and they’re both the same kind of fucked up. That’s why they hate each other so much.”
Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1495106125
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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