Strongest and freshest when it explores the terra infirma of old age.
National Book Award winner Barth’s latest (Where Three Roads Meet, 2005, etc.), a slender collection of linked stories set on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Heron Bay Estates is an oddity for the region: a gated community of the Florida type, complete with resident stickers, a clubhouse and a homeowner’s association. Many residents are retirees, some making the slow transition from mansions to either “villas” (horizontal duplexes) or “coach homes” (vertical duplexes), and from there the sad move to assisted living. The best work here is the most conventional. In “Peeping Tom,” the community is in some ways brought together, in some ways sundered, in others simply entertained by the possibility that a stranger may be peering in through windows at bodies and lives that seem to their owners increasingly invisible and unsought-after. Equally strong is “Toga Party,” the account of a lavish elder-bacchanal that ends with a loving couple deciding spontaneously, but with chilling persuasiveness, to commit suicide by asphyxiation in their garage. The book is weakest when the author does what he did more inventively and exuberantly years ago, as in several tales narrated by retired creative-writing professor George Newett that feature Barth’s hallmark postmodern indeterminacy and self-consciousness. There are broad hints that the book is fiction devised by Newett, or devised by Barth devising behind Newett. That’s the sort of fiction the author prefers, we sense, as Newett, comparing his own stories to the “more imaginative perpetrations” of a student, laments that they seem like “pallid rehashes” of Updike, Cheever and O’Hara, “the muted epiphanies and petty nuances of upper-middle-class life.” This anxiety drains some power from his low-key, clear-eyed, battered-but-unbowed portrait of the diminishments and minor pleasures of age. Barth’s prose still has its sinew and snap; he examines near-decrepitude with mordant, rueful wit. No need for narratorial hand-wringing over failure to push the fictional envelope.
Strongest and freshest when it explores the terra infirma of old age.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-07248-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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