Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.
Stories impeccably careful never to raise their voices, though not much is raised in the reader by them, either: a third collection from the novelist and storywriter (Escapes, 1989, etc.).
Cool-toned, expertly kept at a near-toneless pitch, Williams’s pieces have much about them of Raymond Carver, though not his brevity: too often the tales read long. Their characters seem driven in equal parts by meanness, confusion, and craziness, and few of them will charm—though Donna is certainly nicer than the bitchy friend she dutifully, and inexplicably, visits in the mental hospital (“The Visiting Privilege”), and the 11th-grade daughter in “Honored Guest” is far nicer than her monstrous mother, who admittedly is dying, but still. A mother whose son killed himself—he thought he had spikes in his head—gains a bit of sympathy when she repudiates the boy’s druggy and self-involved friends (“Marabou”), but no character has much affect in another death story (“Substance”), where a suicide leaves mundane belongings to various friends, including leaving his dog to one (the others ditch the stuff; the dog person feels she can’t). Tired tropes are revisited as affluent Americans are shown to know less than the Caribbean locals (“Claro”) or as spoiled American kids play at the ex-pat life in Guatemala, supported by their parents (“Fortune”). The ghost of Flannery O’Connor inspirits a tale or two: “Charity,” about an unhappily married and socially conscious woman who is drawn into progressively deeper trouble with a trashy family; and “The Other Week,” an intricate construction about an ex-alcoholic teetering toward an affair with her mentally questionable gardener. After her husband dies, a diabetic woman takes pistol lessons for a while and befriends her instructor (“Anodyne”); another widow, after an evening with her truly mean daughter (“Hammer”), falls off the wagon and dies five years later, at 50, amid a sprinkling of symbols.
Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-44647-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
In a word: magnificent.
Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.
Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”
In a word: magnificent.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4281-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
IN THE NEWS
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.
From the author of A Wrinkle in Time, 18 gemlike stories ranging from the small heartbreaks of childhood to the discovery of life on a new planet
In these stories, some previously published and others appearing for the first time in this collection, L’Engle explores family dynamics, loneliness, and the pains of growing up. In “Summer Camp,” children show a stunning capacity for cruelty, as when one writes an imploring letter to a lost friend only to witness that friend mocking the letter in front of their bunkmates; in “Madame, Or...” a brother finds his sister at a finishing school with a sordid underbelly and is unable to convince her to leave. L’Engle employs rhythm and repetition to great effect in multiple stories—the same gray cat seems to appear in “Gilberte Must Play Bach” and “Madame, Or...”—and sometimes even in the language of a single sentence: “The piano stood in the lamplight, lamplight shining through burnt shades, red candles in the silver candlesticks...red wax drippings on the base of the candlesticks.” Occasionally, emotional undertones flow over, as in the protagonist’s somewhat saccharine goodbye to her Southern home in “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies.” Overall, though, the stories seem to peer at strong emotions from the corner of the eye, and humor dances in and out of the tales. “A Foreign Agent” sees a mother and daughter in battle over the daughter’s glasses, which have come to represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood when the mother’s literary agent begins to pursue the daughter. On another planet, a higher life form makes a joke via code: The visitors will be “quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered.” While there is levity, many of these stories end with characters undecided, straddling a nostalgic past and an unsettled future. Although written largely throughout the 1940s and '50s, L’Engle’s lucid explorations of relationships make her writing equally accessible today.
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1782-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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