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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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