Updike has never been better than when writing about the Angstroms and their discontents, in his justly famous “quartet,”...
Pronounced echoes of Updike’s earlier fiction dominate this mixed-bag collection of 12 short stories and a novella: jazzlike variations (or “licks”) on the difficulties and consequences of trying to love others better than we love ourselves.
Autumnal reverie and regret, mingled with touches of erotic fantasy are the keynotes of several stories (including “The Women Who Got Away” and “New York Girl”) that evoke the milieu of suburban mate-swapping explored in Updike’s once-notorious Couples. “My Father On the Verge of Disgrace” recalls the vividly conflicted filial feelings of another fine early novel, The Centaur. The autobiographical Of the Farm comes to mind as one reads “The Cats,” about a middle-aged man who buries his elderly mother, but not the complex memories with which she has burdened—and blessed—him. And renegade novelist Henry Bech rears his busy head again, in a new story (the wistful “His Oeuvre”), and also—by imaginative proxy—in the amusing “Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War,” about a quite Bech-like banjo master’s tour of Cold War Soviet Union and his vulnerability to his own haphazard libido. Except for “Licks,” the only piece that isn’t ruminative and virtually plotless is “Metamorphosis,” a perfectly realized portrayal of a cancer patient’s eerie transformative obsession with the woman doctor who performs his “facial surgery.” But the volume’s real raison d’être is “Rabbit Remembered,” in which memories of the late ex-basketball star and serial screwup Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom are dredged up when his middle-aged illegitimate daughter meets her “other” family—and Rabbit’s hitherto nondescript son Nelson, himself aging, divorced, and seeking a family he can still belong to, proves to have been all along the one who loved his infuriating father and will honor his memory.
Updike has never been better than when writing about the Angstroms and their discontents, in his justly famous “quartet,” and in this brilliant and deeply moving coda to it, which can stand by itself as one of his finest novels.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41113-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
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