Irony and humor give lightness to portrayals of familiar and unlikable men.
Men approach turning points in Wilson's debut collection.
Some couples here are expecting their first child, and others have suffered recent miscarriages. In both circumstances, the male partners are often at a loss. “Nesting,” for example, finds Tate failing to construct the enormous playset he bought at Home Depot and feeling inadequate when his pregnant wife, Megan, builds it instead. In “Leaving Charity,” Mac grows resentful when his best friend succeeds where he could not at consoling his wife after her miscarriage. Seeing this, she ends up comforting him. Indeed, male characters throughout are flawed in the same ways. By the time we reach “Everything Is Going to be Okay,” midway through the collection, we know what to expect from Doug. The story opens: “Maria is worried about the future, which has Doug worried because usually his wife is never worried. He blames it on the pregnancy, then hates himself for being that kind of guy.” Wilson’s stories are their most affecting when element of weirdness or even magic enter. In “Chopsticks,” the narrator wakes next to his wife and is literally unable to feel anything. His ennui is funny and intriguing and provides for a rich look at the end of a loveless marriage. In “Florida Power and Light,” Ed, a sex-obsessed bachelor, has a magical transformation that shifts the story abruptly and strangely. And in “Nesting,” Megan’s construction savvy is, supposedly, due to guidance from Tate’s dead dad. The ghost of the father-son dynamic complicates and deepens the marital conflict. Though some readers might wonder why the female character couldn’t have been good at construction without help from a man.
Irony and humor give lightness to portrayals of familiar and unlikable men.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948954-01-3
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Tortoise Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement...
The founding of Rome and the maturation of a hero who has greatness thrust upon him are the subjects of Virgil’s first-century (b.c.) epic, newly available in Princeton scholar Fagles’s energetic verse translation.
It succeeds Fagles’s critically acclaimed and very popular English-language renderings of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, the touchstones that preceded and inspired Virgil (the Latin poet’s hero Aeneas in fact makes a brief appearance in the Iliad). In 12 Books containing nearly 10,000 lines of unrhymed verse hexameters (i.e., six stresses per line), Virgil tells of the endangered voyages of Aeneas’s fleet of ships following the devastation of the Trojan War; his dalliance with Queen Dido of Carthage, and the abandonment of her that adds the scorned monarch’s lethal rage to that of (Aeneas’s nemesis) the offended goddess Juno; the hero’s journey to the underworld and reunion with the ghost of his father Anchises (one of classical literature’s imperishable scenes); and a litany of the deeds and sufferings of noble Romans that expands into a prophetic vision of a glorious future. Veteran scholar Bernard Knox’s replete introduction brilliantly summarizes the poem’s provenance, meanings and influence. And a “Translator’s Postscript” both emphasizes and illustrates “[Virgil’s] unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility . . . of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity.” Fagles varies the hexameter pattern ingeniously, condensing to five stresses, or expanding to seven, depending on the desired rhetorical or emotional effect (e.g., “the dank night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep”)—and demonstrates his talents smashingly in scenes set in “The Kingdom of the Dead” (where, amid sulphurous sound and fury, we hear “. . . a crescendo of wailing, / ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share / of this sweet life, at its very threshold too”).
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement makes us remember it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03803-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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