After years of litigation between the publisher and Cheever's estate, this collection of 13 stories now in the public domain proves something of a disappointment. While Cheever fans will be grateful for a sampling of his juvenilia, others should be warned that these pieces are hardly typical of his best work. Most first appeared in the 30's and bear the marks of their time as well as the influence of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Depression fiction. The earliest stories, from small avant-garde magazines, stress atmosphere over character; they're bleak, abstract expressions of social jitters during an anxious era of poverty and decline. When Cheever begins to find a voice, his fictions become more convincing. A pre-Miller, post-Dreiser traveling shoe-salesman ("The Autobiography of a Drummer") laments his once thriving business. "In Passing" records Cheever's dissatisfaction with left-wing ideology as his young protagonist drifts through lean times. A number of stories deal with working women at turning points: a waitress who suddenly realizes how empty her routine is ("Bayonne"); a hard-working dancer, hired to lend legitimacy to a strip show, who loses herself in her stage persona ("The Princess"); a 52-year-old stripper who, with great dignity, shows she hasn't lost it ("The Teaser"); and a young nanny who reveals a surprisingly refined aesthetic sense ("The Opportunity"). Equally clever and in the same commercial vein are three stories from Collier's, all set on the fringes of high society in the world of horse-racing. With an O. Henryish twist, "His Young Wife" pits an older man against his wife's infatuation with a gambler her own age; "Saratoga" also testifies to the gambler's insatiable habits; and in "The Man She Loved," a socially ambitious dowager manque is determined that her daughter marry well. Cruel fate, not dysfunction, reigns in these clever narratives. At best, middle-brow fiction in the O'Hara-Cozzens mold.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89733-405-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
From veteran Friedman—prolific short-fiction writer and novelist (Let's Hear It for a Beautiful Guy, The Current Climate, etc.), as well as playwright and screenwriter—comes this collection of 40-plus disparate and darkly humorous tales. Included are the never-before-published ``The Gentle Revolutionaries'' and ``Age Before Beauty,'' along with the previously uncollected ``Icing on the Cake'' and ``The Gent,'' both serialized in Playboy, and ``Pitched Out,'' which first appeared in Esquire. Friedman's manly, controlled fiction belies an absurd black humor straining to run amok, with subjects ranging from hopped-up teens to Air Force flyers, from whores and gamblers to death-row culinary experts, and aging family men. Cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and just plain silly, Friedman's short fiction is all over the map. As Kirkus said in 1962 of Black Angels: ``Mr. Friedman can play it black, cool, sick, gimmicky, profound. And he does it all . . . in spades.'' A welcome, hefty collection of an American original's finest writing.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-462-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
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