A marking-time-between-novels book: pleasant enough, but newcomers to Lethem would do better to start with Motherless...
Tales that mix the atmospheric Brooklyn settings of novels like Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) with the fantastic backdrops of earlier, SF-inflected works like the author’s Amnesia Moon (1995).
Even the most realistic stories here allude to the comic-book world where Lethem’s characters always find joy and meaning, and odd adventures take place behind brownstone facades. “The Vision” chronicles a dinner party involving some rather sinister group games, including one called “I Never” that the narrator introduces to expose his host’s childhood immersion in an alternate identity as a Marvel Comics superhero. “Access Fantasy,” strongest of the SF pieces, paints a creepily just-plausible future world that’s divided by a “One-Way Permeable Barrier” between have-nots who live in cars stalled in an eternal traffic jam and the privileged folks who have actual apartments. After watching an “Apartment on Tape” (the entertainment of the dispossessed) that seems to show a murder, the narrator volunteers to wear an Advertising patch that lets him cross the barrier so he can tout Very Old Money Lager to strollers in the Undermall, but his efforts to investigate the murder just get him sent back to the street. Other substantive efforts include “Planet Big Zero,” about a comic-strip artist awkwardly reconnecting with a high-school pal who reminds him how safe and smug his life has become, and “Super Goat Man,” a brooding story whose title character emerges from an obscure comic book into hippie-ish Brooklyn in the 1970s, then becomes a professor at a New Hampshire college, where disaster ensues. “The Glasses” offers a short, sharp jab of racial tension, “The Dystopianist” a dark blend of real and surreal. Perennial Lethem themes abound, from failed love affairs to the disintegration of childhood friendships. No story is less than intelligent, though the author’s fans will miss the deeper explorations he makes in his longer works.
A marking-time-between-novels book: pleasant enough, but newcomers to Lethem would do better to start with Motherless Brooklyn (1999).Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51216-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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