An expertly shaped tale about faith in collision with contemporary American culture.
A paraplegic vet suddenly rises to his feet, catching the attention of religious leaders, reality TV producers, and skeptics.
Miles’ third novel (Want Not, 2013; Dear American Airlines, 2008) is framed as a poker-faced feat of reportage about the case of Cameron Harris, a former U.S. soldier who lost the use of his legs when a Soviet mine exploded near him while on duty in Afghanistan. Four years later, back home in Biloxi, Mississippi, he’s sitting outside a convenience store waiting for his sister when he discovers he can stand and walk. Cue a cultural scrum over America’s sacred and secular divides. Cameron is deemed a vessel of God by the locals, and a Vatican investigator arrives to determine if a legitimate miracle has occurred; the store becomes a shrine of sorts (“It was more like ‘somone…opened a Cracker Barrel at Lourdes’") and, soon, a moneymaker for its bemused Vietnamese immigrant owners; Cameron’s VA doctor puzzles over the illogic of his healing; and a reality TV producer locks down Cameron (and his charismatic, down-home sister, Tanya) for an investigative show, though the network execs press a more Honey Boo Boo–ish angle. Lost in the financial and theological squabbling, naturally, is Cameron himself, who’s bearing a secret that complicates (though doesn’t quite resolve) his “miracle.” Miles possesses a rare and admirable command of structure and style, shifting smoothly from Afghan patrol tactics to Catholic doctrine to neurological science; his sentences are thick with data, wittily delivered. (The store-cum-shrine is populated with "drunks, solicitors, teenagers in groups of more than three, coupon users, check writers, shirtless men, hundred-dollar-bill breakers, fake-ID presenters....") Sometimes that’s a disadvantage, as the novel’s info-soaked prose threatens to overwhelm the story’s psychological tensions. But the closing pages reveal an emotional vulnerability as potent as its research.
An expertly shaped tale about faith in collision with contemporary American culture.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-44758-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.
A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups.
We’re not entirely sure why it is that an unnamed man and his unnamed daughter are an endangered species, but we do know, after the man dies, that the animals call her “the last one.” Before his demise, the man teaches his daughter how to hunt, make snowshoes and arrows, comprehend the ways of the trees and the seasons in their mountain stronghold; they read “poetry from poets with strange names like Homer and Virgil, Hilda Doolittle and Wendell Berry, poems about gods and men and the wars between them, the beauty of small things, and peace,” and they talk night and day about the things that matter. Krivak (The Signal Flame, 2017, etc.) delivers no small amount of poetry himself in what might have been a cloying exercise in anthropomorphism, for once the preteen daughter is alone, a noble-minded bear takes care of her, avoiding “the place of the walls” where humans once dwelled in favor of alpine lakes and, in winter, a remote cave. A puma joins in the adventure to provide food while the bear sleeps, assuring her that she will become part of a story “for the forest to remember for as long as there is forest beneath the sun.” Part of the girl’s task is to bury her father on the distant mountaintop next to her mother’s grave, then, as the years pass, to honor them, “a girl no longer, though forever their child.“ A literary rejoinder of sorts to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), Krivak’s slender story assures us that even without humans, the world will endure: The bears and mountain lions will come into their own in a world of buckled roofs and “ruined books,” and they themselves will tell stories under the light of the Great Bear. That’s small comfort to some humans, no doubt, but it makes for a splendid thought exercise and a lovely fable-cum-novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-942658-70-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
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