Mature, literate work.
Oy. Even if there’s no one named Portnoy here, Clayton’s well-crafted stories abound in existential complaints large and small.
You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Clayton (Writing/Univ. of Massachusetts), but it might help in catching nuances. Clayton takes pains to distinguish universalism, the erasure of tribal differences, from universality, global acceptance of a tribal work, but still, he writes, “I hope for Jewish and non-Jewish readers; but I speak as a Jew.” Some of the later stories collected here have the Jobian sense of accumulated testing: in the author’s case, by the death of a son; in his characters’ cases, by the usual pains of life, of marriages gone dull or dead, of children who distance themselves and memories that flee, all of which can be responded to only by “the Jewish mudra of acquiescence: lower lip out, shoulders up to ear, neck retrenched turtle-like, hands open.” Some of Clayton’s stories, most of them early ones—dating, that is, to the ’70s and ’80s—are a bit lighter of touch, marked by genial squabbling, “postmortems on lovemaking” and furtive tokes on inexpertly rolled joints. A high point in this already strong gathering is the mid-career story “The Man Who Could See Radiance,” with hints of magical realism butting up on Kafkaesque gloom, its protagonist a man who “saved his heart in a safe deposit vault and brought out small sums when he could.” More pointedly up on the headlines, “The Builder” finds the generations worrying over fine distinctions: When a veteran wrestler-with-God offers the observation that the great Mao-induced famine in China in the early ’60s adds up to five holocausts, his interlocutor protests that there’s no comparison—but agrees that cognitive dissonance is really “dissonance of the heart, and how do you live with that?”
Mature, literate work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59264-202-1
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
A treasured staff writer for The New Yorker from 1949 to the mid-70s, Brennan, who died in 1993, receives fresh, well-earned attention in a collection of her 21 Irish stories, all previously published either in Christmas Eve (1974) or In and Out of Never- Never Land (1969,) together with a frank introduction from her editor William Maxwell. The stories appear in three groups, the first autobiographical, and the second and third concerning two separate families, each of whose quietly desperate circumstances is detailed in a series of overlapping vignettes. For Rose and Hubert Derdon, the state of things surfaces in ``A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances'' when Rose, as always, goes to a Mass commemorating her father's death, now 43 years ago, leaving Hubert, as always resentful at the upset of his morning routine. Later, he wants to make amends, and remembers a blue hyacinth he'd given her years before and how happy she'd been to receive it. The truce established between them when he asks her about it, however, collapses as his habitual criticism of her resumes. In the third group, the Bagots—Delia, Martin, and their two young daughters- -fare only marginally better: Martin sleeps in a separate room and has only minimal communication with his family; Delia keeps an immaculate home but hardly ever leaves it. The loss of their firstborn son three days after his birth was a shock they never recovered from. In the extraordinary title piece, Delia and Martin's wedding is remembered after their deaths by his twin sister, spinster Min, who took their furniture and his wedding ring to her flat the better to indulge her satisfaction at having survived Martin, whom she feels betrayed his family to marry. With an understatement often approaching brilliance, the suppressed emotions and diminished lives echoing here make clear that this voice of the last generation deserves to be heard anew.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-87046-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Writing in Urdu, Chughtai (19151991) paved the way for modern Indian and Pakistani women writers to harshly probe their social milieu's double standards for men and women, rich and poor. Each of these 15 stories concerns marriage in one way or another, and most begin or end with a wedding. But don't expect happy romances; these are arranged, often brutal unions. The woman in ``The Quilt'' is so lonely in her husband's house that she takes a female servant as her lover; the beautiful young bride in ``The Veil,'' forbidden by Hindu tradition to remove her own veil, is thus forced to disobey her husband. While wedding guests heap praise on each bride's beauty, it is assumed that pregnancy will soon make them fat and ungainly. In ``The Eternal Vine,'' intense suspicion is aroused when the wife keeps her looks and indeed even looks younger as her husband ages. Even in this rigid society, a few young women manage to elope, usually with men of a different religion. Indeed, Chughtai's stories offer insightful glances into the conflicts faced when Muslims, Hindus, and Christians live side by side. As the book progresses, its focus shifts from the upper echelons to the servant class. Here, wives cannot be sent off; there's no money to pay for another bride, and it ``doesn't make a wit of difference, whether or not a servant maid enters wedlock.'' A maze of first, second, and third marriages—with unions between cousins, aunts, and uncles permitted—confuses reader and narrator alike: ``By some odd coincidence I was my mother's distant cousin as well, and by that token my father was also my brother-in-law,'' the youthful narrator of ``Aunt Bichu'' explains, pesenting one of the book's simpler equations. While the basic plots of these stories are engrossing, the characters aren't sufficiently individualized, possibly due to imperfections in the translation.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994
ISBN: 1-878818-34-1
Page Count: 140
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
