Short, sharp shots (many of them aimed at sensuality and love) from the master of moody foreboding. Most of the 44 stories collected here are very short—no more than two or three pages—and treat an intimation of greed, lust or death arising from a minor (or, since Oates sometimes scorns plot, minimized) event. In "The Boy," a teacher intends to seduce a student who has been mooning over her, but instead avenges herself lustily for an unsatisfying life. In "Photographer's Model," an uncle's predilection for photographing his niece as a child has the result of making her perverse—in fact, a whore. When 15-year-old Junie's Momma in "Mule" takes a new lover who—like the lovers before him—soon begins to bang at windows and slap Momma around (evidently out of crazed desire for her "creepy" breasts), this time Junie herself dons high heels and leaves her mother to threatened suicide; like Momma's lover in a story he tells, she'll dive into the stream of life and take a good look at the corpse of a mule rotting there. In fact, fever, decay, nausea, protuberance, and intimations of mortality lead the way to dusty irony in many of these sketches, only some of which strike any target. As in the title story, "The Assignation" ("She rubs her body with hand lotion, breasts, buttocks and thighs, belly, legs. She's hypnotized by the feel of so much fleshy flesh"), the target is usually a solipsistic and a shadowy self, dreaming of an outside world. Vintage Oates—always interesting, though not always pleasant.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0880014407
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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