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
Radio host Keillor (Wobegon Boy, 1997, etc.) takes a station break and puts together this year’s Best American collection. Most of the entries, it must be said, are a long way from “above average.” The withering of the few mainstream journals still interested in fiction was a process underway long before Tina Brown stepped off the Concorde, but its effect is still being felt: the majority of pieces here have the sketchy, tentative feel of outlines, first drafts, or’sadder still—mere scribblings rather than fully crafted narratives. Many are simple recollection pieces, like John Updike’s elegiac, unsatisfying “My Father on the Verge” (a young man growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1930s) or Poe Ballantine’s even flatter “The Blue Devils of River Avenue” (a shy suburban boy’s encounter with the disreputable family down the block). The “slice-of-life” genre is beginning to seem more and more like a sitcom in which nothing happens, although Carol Anshaw’s “Elvis Has Left the Building,” about the daily travails of a couple of lesbian friends, manages at least to wrap up several uninteresting characters in a modicum of wit. The more ambitious stories nearly all disappoint: Doran Larson’s “Morphine” offers an undergraduate rendition of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, while Diane Schoemperlen’s “Body Language” (on the less-than-blissful marriage of “he” and “she” from an anatomical perspective) is only slightly less pretentious. Among such company, more ordinary narratives like Tim Gatreaux’s “Wedding With Children” (an old man attempts to provide some moral direction to his fatherless grandchildren) or Akhil Sharma’s “Cosmopolitan” (an Indian immigrant has an unhappy love affair with an older American woman) come as something of a relief, if not much of a pleasure. For the trade only, as they say: a coffeetable book that few will want to crack.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-87515-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
A whopping collection of 30 stories, narrative poems, and unclassifiable briefer pieces from the peerlessly inventive British-born co-editor/creator of The Sandman graphic novel series and last year’s terrific fantasy Neverwhere. Gaiman, who’s also provided a disarmingly genial introduction, calls these tales “messages from Looking-Glass Land and pictures in shifting clouds.” Though they’re often derivative of both traditional folk materials and acknowledged favorite writers (such as John Collier, H.P. Lovecraft, and Michael Moorcock), the volume’s numerous successes put an engaging spin on even more-than-twice-told tales. “Nicholas Was,” for instance, offers in scarcely half a page a hair-raising revisionist look at the benevolent figure of Santa Claus. The poem “The White Road” deftly reimagines the English ballad about the innocent virgin fated to be sacrificed to her vulpine fiance (“Mr. Fox”). “The Daughter of Owls” is a fiendishly compact revenge tale told in the manner of (“as by”) 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. Elsewhere, Gaiman offers amusingly lurid images of “swinging” London in the —70s (“Looking for the Girl”), Hollywood’s past and present “wild days” (“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”), and sex in the age of AIDS (the very erotic “Tastings”). And, at his best, he makes something daringly new out of the stories we think we know best: “Baywolf” memorably combines the narrative and pictorial elements of the real Beowulf and of TV’s Baywatch; “Snowglass, Apples” retells the story of Snow White from the viewpoint of the exasperated “evil queen”; and two tales (“Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” and “Only the End of the World”), set respectively in the Innsmouth of England and of New England, pay hilarious homage to Lovecraft’s Ctulhu Mythos and the conventions of the classic horror film. Gaiman miscalculates only in leading off With “Chivalry,” the unforgettable tale of a placid widow who discovers the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop. Nothing later on matches it in a volume that’s otherwise an exhilarating display of the work of one of our most entertaining storytellers.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97364-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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