Finely wrought tales, but the characters, no matter how varied, seem clichéd and their pasts contrived.
Twelve elegant but underpowered stories from Hemingway/PEN Award–winner Silber (In the City, 1987, etc.), charting the lives of those who, after misspent youth, settle down for the duration and ponder the changes.
The concept is an intriguing one: What happens to people who live and love dangerously? Do they ever change, or do they continue their wild ways? Silber's people have changed, mostly for the conventional better, but, like exiles, they often look back to that other territory that was once their life. “Lake Natsink,” which first appeared in The New Yorker, shows a woman named Patty, who works at a substance abuse clinic in Manhattan, recalling the years she associated with drug dealers as she prepares to leave the city with her lesbian lover and their adopted mixed-race child for a new life upstate. The reality of their life in the country is detailed in a linked story, “Ordinary”: Patty encounters prejudice but understands that she can't go back, can't even quite remember the city now. Other notable tales describe an artist who marries a much older Englishman in order to get him a green card, then, 20 years later, finds it difficult to leave him (“First Marriage”); a woman, now married and working with innercity children, who is reminded of her time with a rock band when she stays with an old friend in Italy whose teenage son is having problems (“Ragazzi”); the middleaged manager of a video store whose own irresponsible past comes to mind when her pretty clerk takes up with an obviously bad boy (“Comforts”); and, in the most harrowing piece here, a woman who looks back to the night her disturbed stepsister was raped and murdered (“Without Ellie”).
Finely wrought tales, but the characters, no matter how varied, seem clichéd and their pasts contrived.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-889330-42-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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