The author of the novel The Invisible Circus (1994) collects 11 somewhat strained stories that seem suited to the glossy venues in which they first appeared (e.g., GQ and Mademoiselle): They're slick if utterly predictable lifestyle studies that entertain very conventional notions of conformity and wildness. Most often, Egan's financially successful protagonists yearn for the simplicity or adventure of their previous lives. In ``Why China?,'' an unhappy stock trader—who's being investigated for improprieties—takes his family to remote China on vacation partly to recapture his former bohemian self. Similarly, ``The Watch Trick'' compares the lives of two army buddies, one settled into a stable married life, the other still living from scam to scam. The title story concerns the other side of the dream, when desire still motivates the young and ambitious—in this case, a photographer's assistant and his wannabe-model girlfriend. It's sort of a morality tale (being beautiful isn't always enough) for the Seventeen set. Egan's stronger pieces are told from a young girl's point of view and usually involve some sort of small, if intense, revelation: discovering that her father is unfaithful to her long-suffering mother (``Puerta Vallarta''); that she can redeem her older brother from his guilt over their mother's death (``One Piece''); that her mother's second husband is really a nice guy (``Sacred Heart''); and that maybe life isn't so bad as a ``watcher'' rather than a ``doer'' of wild stunts. Egan also worries a lot about older women cast aside by their successful husbands: the ex-wife of the investment banker who long condescended to the woman passed around by her husband's friends only to find that he too had been with her (``Passing the Hat''); and the 32-year-old divorcÇe of ``Spanish Winter'' who sleeps around Spain, giving up on life until she hooks up with a shady investor on the run. The lure of adventure and the lust for wealth in Egan's schematic little fictions are just yuppie fantasies; she seldom gets beyond the clichÇs of money and personal crisis.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48212-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A brilliantly executed and altogether charming collection of linked stories, by the Croatian-born author of the autobiographical Apricots from Chernobyl (not reviewed). There's great variety in these 17 feisty narratives, several portraying the childhood and adolescent experiences of a recurring protagonist: the son of a clog-maker who, at different stages of his growth, discovers how fundamental to all living creatures is the yearning for freedom (``Yahbo the Hawk''); endures the complex rite of passage triggered by his father's death (``Apple''); undergoes a reluctant religious education (in the marvelous ``The Eye of God''), during which he progresses from the romantic wish to become ``An evangelist . . . A Billy Grahamovich'' to a warier accommodation with the Deity; and, in the climactic ``Raw Paper,'' recognizes that he's outgrown his European origins and pens a valediction to them as he prepares to leave his homeland for America. Other stories, which take place in various Yugoslavian and other Eastern European settings, introduce such vividly drawn characters as the village girl (in ``Wool'') who finally stands up to the abusive father whose mistreatment of her extends to her pet lamb; the stoical beekeeper (of ``Honey in the Carcase'') who patiently bears the violence brought by civil strife but snaps when his apiary is endangered; and (in the title story) the plain country woman, renowned for her cookery, who learns how to repay the gluttonous men who marry her to exploit her. Novakovich's essentially comic depictions of ordinary people bewildered and buffered by sophisticated exterior forces are somewhat reminiscent of the work of the Czech master Jaroslav Hasek. But his incandescent style is all his own: an exhilarating hybrid compounded of wry understatement, dazzling aphoristic wit, infusions of peasant superstition, and a deadpan, down-to-earth Central European variant of Latin American magical realism. Wonderful stories that won't be easily forgotten. It's our good fortune, and should be a source of some national pride, that Novakovich is now an American writer.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-55597-229-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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