A collection of short stories set along the connections of gay life, Jewish life and Mormon life.
This 2010 collection from Townsend (Flying Over Babel, 2011, etc.) features 12 stories of lives caught in the conflict of public religion and private identity; the young men in these tales are all searching for a larger happiness, be it social or spiritual or even sexual (“If penguins can be monogamous,” says one character, “we ought to be able to manage it as well”). Obstacles abound—too profusely, in fact; most of these stories suffer because of an emphasis on shocking material. In the long title story, for instance, the burlesque of a rabbi creating a perfect lover out of clay drowns out a rather touching story of frustrated love trying to make itself heard. To one extent or another, this is true of every story here, and after a while, even Townsend’s sharp ear for dialogue and often nuanced treatment of lust can’t soften the text’s emphasis on prompting gasps of outrage from conservative readers. In one story, two good-looking young men find friendship through a shared love of the Talmud—but also through a shared love of frantic shagging in the afternoon, which feels hastily tacked on to a more cerebral but also more involving story. This is, of course, the signature danger of porn: it tends to kill all aesthetics but its own, and its own is usually very, very simple. Townsend is already given to telegraphing his punches: “When I was a kid, I loved staying in the kitchen to hear the women talk,” one of his characters confesses, and the reader can only sigh at this often-used staple of gay coming-of-age stories. A strong collection, but its internal conflicts—between sensitive depiction of Jewish intellectual life and raunchy tales of porn—ultimately work at cross-purposes.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1609104412
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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