Still, Orringer stakes out some ground for herself with these compact little pieces about growing up in tough circumstances.
Mordant snapshots of lives under stress.
As a career calling card, one could definitely do worse than this debut collection of nine stories. In the opening piece, “Pilgrims,” a simple Thanksgiving Day visit by a family to the house of some friends takes a macabre turn when the game being played by the children in the backyard goes too far. This dark-tinged flavor is echoed in “Stations of the Cross,” the volume’s climactic story, which has deeper things on its mind—the travails of a Jewish girl trying to figure out where she stands in an almost entirely Catholic small Louisiana town—before going off the rails with a children’s reenactment of the Crucifixion that starts to mirror a lynching. If Orringer has a problem, it’s one endemic to the modern short story: that these are for the most part still lives; they don’t go anywhere. “The Isabel Fish” is an extremely competent and well-wrought tale about a teenaged girl who recently almost died in a car wreck that killed her older brother’s girlfriend—something he now hates her for, a strange variant of survivor guilt. But as convincingly as Orringer is able to travel the strange by-ways of the adolescent mindset, there’s no movement in the story, just the usual onionskin peeling away of memory until the details surrounding the primal crash are revealed. One piece that breaks the mold is “Stars of Motown Shining Bright,” in which a young girl (another one) is made an accomplice by a friend who’s planning to elope with a guy who doesn’t exactly seem like husband material. While it’s not the best entry here, it at least progresses from A to B and gives you a reason to persevere to the final lines; it’s unlike most of these stories, which just peter out, albeit in a quiet and artful manner.
Still, Orringer stakes out some ground for herself with these compact little pieces about growing up in tough circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4111-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This illuminating collection of 37 crisp, economically turned stories is the first US publication—on the occasion of Brecht’s centenary—of a volume that originally appeared in England in 1983. It’s a welcome display of the great playwright and poet (who was also, like Pirandello and Strindberg, a masterly writer of fiction) in several of his less celebrated roles: as sharp-eyed analyst of social and political life in Berlin between the World Wars (—The Monster,— —The Job—); mischievous historical revisionist (—Socrates Wounded—); and purveyor of commercial detective stories (—A Question of Taste—). A few stories (—Four Men and a Poker Game,— —Safety First—) adumbrate plays to come, and at least one—the unfinished —Life Story of the Boxer Samson- Kîrner”’suggests that this truly protean man of letters might well have become an important novelist as well.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-402-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Twelve mesmerizing tales about the subterranean forces of artistic creation, and about the eruption of the uncanny into quotidian life, by one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive modern American writers. Millhauser, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler (1998), typically works a narrow but deep terrain, focusing on such things as the allure of various kinds of underworld, the lives of obsessed artists, the shimmering mysteries of the natural world. All are present in this new collection. The title story examines what happens when a performer possessing almost supernatural skill in his craft feels driven by his own need to excel and by the desires of his audiences—to transgress, using his knives to explore the boundary between art and life, with fatal consequences. Art, Millhauser reminds us, is necessary (the knife thrower’s audiences crave his performances), but also necessarily dangerous. “Paradise Park” offers another version of the creator an transgressor, represented by the astonishing efforts of a designer of a turn-of-the-century amusement park on Coney Island to outdo his rivals, culminating in the creation of a vast underground park more like purgatory than paradise, challenging its audiences ideas about what art and technology should do. Several of the tales here, including “Flying Carpets,” “The Sisterhood of Night,” and “Clair de Lune,” issue from Millhauser’s fascination with the special receptivity that children and adolescents demonstrate for the mysterious potentials of life, for sensing the sheer strangeness behind the everyday. “Balloon Flight, 1870” mingles metaphysics with the traditional elements of an adventure tale, and “A Visit” offers an ironic reworking of an old folklore motif, involving the marriage of a man and an animal. Enchanting, often disturbing tales, written in a prose of deceptive simplicity, providing further evidence that Millhauser is a fabulist of rare power.
Pub Date: May 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60070-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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