Even more impressive than Russell's critically acclaimed novel.
A consistently arresting, frequently stunning collection of eight stories.
Though Russell enjoyed her breakthrough—both popular and critical—with her debut novel (Swamplandia!, 2011), she had earlier attracted notice with her short stories (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006). Here, she returns to that format with startling effect, reinforcing the uniqueness of her fiction, employing situations that are implausible, even outlandish, to illuminate the human condition. Or the vampire condition, as she does in the opening title story, where the ostensibly unthreatening narrator comes to term with immortality, love and loss, and his essential nature. Then there’s “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979,” about a 14-year-old boy’s sexual initiation during a summer in which he is so acutely self-conscious that he barely notices that his town has been invaded by sea gulls, “gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks.” Perhaps the most ingenious of this inspired lot is “The New Veterans,” with a comparatively realistic setup that finds soldiers who are returning from battle given massages to reduce stress. In one particular relationship, the elaborately tattooed back of a young veteran provides a narrative all its own, one transformed by the narrative process of the massage. The interplay has profound implications for both the masseuse and her initially reluctant patient; both discover that “healing hurts sometimes.” The two shortest stories are also the slightest, though both reflect the seemingly boundless imagination of the author. “The Barn at the End of Our Term” finds a seemingly random group of former presidents in denial (at both their loss of power and the fact that they have somehow become horses), and “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating” presents the “Food Chain Games” as the ultimate spectator sport. With the concluding “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” about a group of teenage bullies and an urban scarecrow, the fiction blurs all distinction between creative whimsy and moral imperative.
Even more impressive than Russell's critically acclaimed novel.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95723-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
A flat, emotionless style deadens the impact of this debut collection of short stories and a novella. Nasty and neutral men (and boys) people these stories, but a good one is hard to find. In ``Starkweather's Eyes,'' the narrator remembers the time shortly after his father left him and his mother in Nebraska, where a serial killer roamed. Carroll is ``Babyman,'' a con artist who impregnates women in order to sell the resulting children. The narrator of ``What Hurts the Fish,'' a boy spending his days with a woman named Evelyn—who wears a special prosthetic shoe because she was dropped and crippled as a baby—starts out sentimentally (``I love Evelyn, but I'm afraid of her shoe''), but soon shoots another boy in the eye with a BB gun and hides what he has done. Condon's female characters are equally unfeeling. In ``Coffee,'' a woman whose father called her ``sex-sick'' when she got pregnant at 18 coolly has sex with a man her now 11-year-old son met at the beach. ``The Velvet Shelf'' shows Natalie responding to her boyfriend being brought to her door by the police (he buried her puppy after it was run over by a car, then went back to dig it up, fearing that he'd buried it alive) by taking it as an opportunity to break up with him. There is plenty of violence too. In ``The Emptyheart Boy'' a recently divorced man listens to his female neighbor being abused by three low-lifes without doing anything, even when his girlfriend urges him to, because ``down deep I was afraid of people, period.'' The short novella ``River Street'' follows a drifter to a sleazy motel where he is attacked and raped. Too macho for its own good.
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-87074-372-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
This is Self's first book, an interconnected collection of stories published in England in 1991 but held back in the US until the moment Self attained trans-Atlantic culthood. Self (My Idea of Fun, p. 243, etc.) has previously proven his skill at phantasmagoria, but he's less impressive here. Sharply tweaking a spectrum of mental health and social work philosophies, Self is on a mission to point out that therapists who treat delusional problems are themselves the ones with the problems. In the title story, a mock academic paper, a psychology researcher explains how he came to discover the remarkably unscientific Quantity Theory—which holds that there's a fixed amount of sanity in any given society at any given time, and a small patch of insanity in one area of that society will result in a small patch of sanity elsewhere. (Eventually ``psychic field disruption,'' planned insanity to create sanity for someone else, becomes a popular self-help routine. It's just the karma theory, given a spin of European nihilism.) Self's working method for this collection becomes apparent too quickly: He hits on a kooky, half-true theory, then backs up into his parking space. But his stories are contrived in their efforts to shock us, and the ideas themselves are like outtakes from undergraduate stoner-philosopher what-if sessions. It's only when Self gets away from his adman mentality to really do some great, not readily marketable writing that we catch glimpses of his brilliance—as in ``Mono-Cellular,'' which shifts from a first-person account of experiencing life through the senses into fabulous elliptical blather, like the best of the late-period, whacked-out CÇline. Those sympathetic to Self's fantasies, which can be fun-house amusing, should read where he came from to know how much he's evolved.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-585-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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