Scapellato’s debut is unpredictable, witty, and self-aware while remaining heartfelt in the most unexpected ways.
Scapellato’s first collection of short fiction means to bust the mythologies of the American West.
In these 25 stories, Scapellato moves from the allegorical to the (almost) natural, traversing the territory with a fluid grace. “Cowgirl” takes its title at face value, describing a young woman, “born of a beef cow,” who must navigate a human world that is completely alien to her. “Do I come from myself? Do I come from outside myself? Do I need to know? Do I need new questions?” she asks in a litany that might stand as an epigraph for the entire book. What Scapellato does so well here is what he does throughout these narratives: to take the absurd and make it real. “It was loaded, I was loaded. The bottle was not the only way but it was the way that was available, my husband’s way, the weakest way to make me strong,” he begins “A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again,” the saga of a woman trying to save her teenage son. The truth, of course, is that he can’t be saved, any more than anyone here can be—or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he must save himself. Certainly, that’s what happens to the protagonist of “Driving in the Early Dark, Ted Falls Asleep,” which closes with a plaintive inquiry: “I want to live awake?” Living awake, of course, is the best that we can hope for, which the figures who populate these strange and graceful stories understand. “It was the kind of day that made you think that thinking about the things that mattered was what mattered,” the narrator insists in “One of the Days I Nearly Died,” which unfolds, for the most part, as a single paragraph. “Was where you were what mattered?”
Scapellato’s debut is unpredictable, witty, and self-aware while remaining heartfelt in the most unexpected ways.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-76980-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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