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
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
