A deeply transgressive, riveting shot out of the gate. Arndt is one to watch.
Teetering between the everyday and the surreal, Arndt’s debut collection investigates narratives of the queer body.
Many of the unnamed narrators in Arndt’s stories defy categorization. Even in their own thoughts, they skitter up to the boundaries of language and glance away, unwilling—or unable—to put a name to their identities. “I’m like a...you know,” attempts the narrator of “Been a Storm” during her brief roadside encounter buying fishing bait from two backwoods misfits. In the sardonic “Jeff,” a chance meeting with Lily Tomlin, who calls Jess by the wrong name, sets off an imaginary battle between Jess and Jeff, the alternative identity she both loathes and longs for. In “Third Arm,” the narrator obsesses over the feeling of “carrying around something that wasn’t mine,” while in “Together,” a couple deals with an intestinal parasite taking up room—literal and figurative—in the dregs of their relationship. Nothing in Arndt’s worlds is straight. Through the haze of alcohol or drugs or self-loathing hallucinations, characters elbow for space with frightening visions that exist just outside what is real. They morph into animals or become literal representations of figurative language; they flee the instability of inner turmoil only for their existential fears to manifest as larger-than-life visions. Reading Arndt is like walking toward a shimmering desert mirage and being met with a cloud of acid instead of an oasis of cool water. You’re not sure what just happened or whether you’re the same now that it’s over. Maybe you were never there to begin with.
A deeply transgressive, riveting shot out of the gate. Arndt is one to watch.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-48-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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