With her focus on deviant and twisted characters, Oates continues to be a worthy descendant of the gothic tradition of Edgar...
Four novellas—and as the subtitle informs us, in each, love has definitely “gone wrong” in perverse and creepy ways.
The titular story concerns a nazar, a “talisman to ward off the ‘evil eye.’ ” Mariana, the narrator, is the fourth wife (almost always italicized, to emphasize her outsider status) of Austin Mohr, prominent director of an arts institute in San Francisco. Twenty-five years younger than her moody and volatile husband, Mariana is timid and conforming—until her domestic equilibrium is disrupted by the visit of Ines Zambranco, the first wife. The second narrative introduces us to Lizbeth, a 16-year-old who shyly develops a relationship with Desmond Parrish, an outgoing, brash and highly intelligent young man who’s supposedly taking a gap year before continuing his academic career at Amherst. Over a period of several months, Lizbeth gets increasingly nervous about Desmond’s mental stability—a valid suspicion, as she later finds out he had killed his young sister and been incarcerated in a psychiatric ward for seven years. “The Execution” puts us inside the mind of Bart Hansen, a college student seething with a monstrous hatred of his father, so he plans what he hopes will be the perfect crime—killing him with an axe. Although things inevitably go wrong (like his forgetting about the evidence provided by EZ Pay when he makes the journey home to do the murder), an exceptionally clever lawyer gets Bart his freedom since the trial ends with a hung jury. The final novella, “The Flatbed,” concerns Cecelia, a woman who’s not able to have normal sexual relations because her grandfather abused her when she was young. A man romantically interested in her becomes furious when he learns of this and arranges a meeting to get revenge on the old man.
With her focus on deviant and twisted characters, Oates continues to be a worthy descendant of the gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2047-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Sixteen stories in three groups (War, Armistice, Peace) but united by a common gift: the author's fine-tuned ability to craft astute observations of human nature. In his foreword to this second collection, Flynn (The Last Klick, not reviewed, etc.) says he hopes the reader will find ``the spirit of God in every story,'' but it seems more the spirit of man that colors the best of the pieces here, with their themes of the Vietnam War, Christianity, and the sometimes unclear distinctions between good and evil. Most manage to stay free of stereotype and clichÇ. In ``Land of the Free,'' a black father and his adolescent daughter remain dignified as they stand up to ignorance in a backwoods Texas town. The Hemingwayesque ``A Boy and His Dog''a young Marine in Vietnam loses confidence in his trained dog when the animal fails to detect a mine and allows another Marine to dieis a clear twist on the traditional version of man and man's best friend. ``At Play in the Sewers of the Lord'' is also a spin on the familiar: An inheritance, a sewage plant, becomes not a boon but an albatross. And ``Games Children Play,'' though it wraps up too neatly, highlights the complex relationship between children who think they need to parent an elderly mother and the still keen, resentful mother herself. The author's chief weakness is a liking for the obvious: ``Reluctant Truth'' is saved, barely, by its quirky grandfather, but the title story makes too overt an analogy between hyenas and men, while ``X-mas,'' about a modern-day birth of the baby Jesus, suffers from a lack of subtlety that's fortunately the exception more than the rule throughout. In most of the stories here, though, Flynn portrays quiet dignity, humanity, and a wisdom that comes from experience.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-87565-144-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
``I coulda married Joe Morgan, who owns three Tastee Freezes,'' a wife tells her husband—not unkindly—in Hoffman's third collection (after By Land, By Sea, 1988). It's just this sort of low ambition that runs like a fault line through these competent but commonplace stories. ``Home'' is the mid-South, by turns genteel, grotesque and seedy. Hoffman's range is broad, but the track is well worn: Feisty widows drink ``tonic'' and bemoan their faded beauty; horses are noble and bird dogs soft of mouth; great-great-grandaddy was a Confederate colonel and a US senator. At their best, these stories relate with great tenderness the small kindnesses people share: Celeste, the black maid in ``Coals,'' antagonizes but ultimately comforts her grieving white employer; the retired and embittered preacher in ``Sweet Armageddon'' prays for doomsday but is solicitous toward his wife, regretful of the poverty to which his principled stubbornness has reduced them. At their worst, the pre-fab familiarity of character and situation dulls the intended effect. ``Abide With Me,'' meant to be a raucous tall tale about a man who sees God and raises a statue in tribute, degenerates instead into a catalogue of tired bumpkin caricatures and cute southern colloquialisms. Like the anglophile fox hunter in ``Points,'' for whom the chase is ``choosing to reach back into the best epochs the centuries had to offer, as well as a statement of where one stood in respect to a world becoming increasingly common, disordered, and hateful,'' many of these characters—aging, fighting irrelevance, confronted with evidence of their own deterioration as well as that of society—seek refuge from the inhospitable present in the past. In the best southern literary tradition, they are more often haunted than comforted by their heritage. Well-crafted, but oh so familiar.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8071-1835-4
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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