Since the death of Martha Foley, the Best American Short Stories series has been in the hands of annual celebrity-editors—so, while William Abrahams' O. Henry Awards collections have become ever more sturdily sound and balanced, the Best have become idiosyncratic and erratic, more a gathering of personal favorites than a trustworthy reflection of the evolving short-story scene. And now, with selections by the notoriously didactic John Gardner, this decimation of the Foley legacy is virtually complete. Gardner's faintly apologetic introduction gives one a fair idea of what's ahead: he says that he put off his compilation to the last minute, that some stories were included because of his wife's strong feelings; he announces his preference for stories of "deep seriousness"—which, in this case, means sentimental, unsophisticated work written in opposition to all the sorts of fiction which Gardner so famously deplores (cf. Moral Fiction). And it's disturbing to note that four of the weakest pieces originated in literary magazines with Gardner-academia connections. True, five of the stories here are worthy of anyone's anthology: Raymond Carter's "Cathedral," perhaps an American classic (already anthologized in this year's Random Review); Charles Baxter's "Harmony Of The World"; William Hauptman's loose and rippling delight, "Good Rockin' Tonight"; Mary Robison's pop-artish "Coach"; and a piece of grim, grisly realism from Charles Johnson. The rest, however, is heartbreakingly dull: a YA-ish dolphin story; Holocaust parables of no immediacy whatsoever; the dreary memoirs of an aging roue; a particularly long and uninvolving Joyce Carol Oates story; and several amateurish efforts among the rest. As a sampling of what moral-crusader Gardner likes in short-story fiction, then, this is certainly informative. But it's hardly a fair reflection of the year's best—and perhaps this series should take on a new title if such unbalanced collections are to be expected in the future.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0395322073
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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