Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely.
Characters in the throes of grief navigate their displacement in this collection of stories.
Taking readers from a small flat in Montreal to the vast dusty spaces of Western Australia, these 10 stories feature characters who are émigrés or travelers, a hybrid, in-between state that mirrors their inner states. In “Sinkers,” a young man returns to his mother’s Australian hometown to spread her ashes, though the town is completely underwater. In another story, a young Frenchwoman whose husband is killed near the Syria-Turkey border starts over in an American city and forms a melancholy relationship with a neighbor’s dog (“Chavez”). For two Australian women, married to each other just 13 days, an American hotel room on a road trip is the site of an argument over which of them should become pregnant in their quest to start a family (“Anything Remarkable”). Even characters grounded in nameless suburbia, like the wife who can no longer hide her revulsion for the much-watched pornographic tape she and her husband made as newlyweds (“Post-structuralism for Beginners”), are facing down a sense of becoming unmoored, caught between where they thought they belonged and an unknowable future. Rowe (A Loving, Faithful Animal, 2017) is a writer of great subtlety, and what could, in lesser hands, be quiet stories from familiar emotional landscapes become revelatory here. Rowe’s shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose. As one character says of a pond that has drained away with only its frozen surface remaining: “It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic.” So, too, with Rowe’s work.
Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-07-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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